Arlington National Cemetery. Public domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Veterans Day is tomorrow. However, in the great Commonwealth of Virginia — the birthplace of George Washington, the state where Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, the home of Arlington National Cemetery — the largest school district has decided its students no longer need the day off to honor the men and women who served this nation.
The Fairfax County School Board voted this spring to remove Veterans Day as a student holiday for the upcoming academic year. The official reason given was concern about disruptions to the school calendar. A reasonable-sounding explanation — until you learn what they kept.
Both Veterans Day and Indigenous People’s Day (the left’s alternative for Columbus Day) were up for removal, but only one made the cut. The one they chose to protect was not the one honoring the people who bled and died to preserve the freedoms that allow school boards to make decisions like this one in the first place.
This is the same Fairfax County school board that included explicit LGBT-themed graphic novels in its school libraries. That is, until a Virginia mother showed up at a board meeting with the actual content printed out and held it up for the room to see. Those books were quietly removed, but the board learned nothing. This is also the same district that has been actively fighting the Trump administration’s directives on transgender bathroom policies in schools.
Fairfax County is not some distant blue-state anomaly. This is Virginia — a state steeped in military history unlike almost any other in the nation. Decisive battles of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars were fought on Virginia soil. This state gave us Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Arlington Cemetery, where row after row of white markers honor those who gave everything, sits just miles from the Fairfax County school offices. If any school district in America should be holding Veterans Day sacred, it is this one.
What we are watching is not a budget decision. It is a values decision — and the values on display tell you exactly what this school board thinks of the military history that made their comfortable jobs possible.
Parents in Fairfax County deserve better. And so do the our nation’s veterans.
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