Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares announced a two-part investigation into Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology (TJ), a prestigious magnet school in Fairfax County frequently recognized as one of the top public high schools in the country.

Miyares said his Office of Civil Rights would dig into whether race was a factor in a delay in distributing National Merit Letters of Commendation, a recognition of a high test score on the PSAT, to students at the school. He also said the state would investigate whether certain changes to the TJ admissions process — already the subject of an initially unsuccessful federal court case and heated community debate — are racially discriminatory to Asian-American students.

Both prongs of the TJ investigation will evaluate whether officials at the school are in violation of the Virginia Human Rights Act, the state’s main antidiscrimination law.

“Racism and race-based government decision-making in any form is wrong and is against who we are as a people and who we are as a nation, and I intend to get to the bottom of this,” Miyares told reporters on Wednesday.

The admissions changes at TJ do not explicitly use race as a factor in acceptances to the highly selective school. Instead, they raise the minimum GPA, get rid of an admissions test and secure spots for eighth graders in the top 1.5% of their middle school, among other changes. For the class of 2025, the first admitted under the new system and the most diverse in the school’s recent history, the changes resulted in a larger cohort of Black and Hispanic students admitted, a major increase in the proportion of low-income students, and a somewhat lower proportion of Asian-American students. The class of 2026 followed a similar pattern, though the percentage of Asian students increased slightly.

Last year, a federal lawsuit alleging racial discrimination and attempting to halt the new admissions process stalled, with the Supreme Court declining to overturn a lower court decision that allowed TJ to continue using the process while the lawsuit continues.

Miyares did not point to any specific evidence of racial animus in the delay in distributing the National Merit commendation letters, which recognize high scores on the PSAT. But he did note that Asian-American and immigrant families were affected due to the make-up of the student body. (Two-thirds of the TJ student body in the 2021-2022 school year were Asian-American, a percentage that has continued in the first months of the current school year.)

The delay, some parents say, meant students left the honor off of early college application submissions, though there is some debate about to what extent the award could make or break TJ students’ college admissions chances.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has also alleged that the delay was purposeful and would harm students’ chances to gain entry to the college of their choice. On Tuesday, he called for an investigation into the letter distribution.

“We need to get to the bottom of what appears to be an egregious, deliberate attempt to disadvantage high-performing students at one of the best schools in the country,” said Youngkin in a statement. “Parents and students deserve answers and Attorney General Miyares will initiate a full investigation. I believe this failure may have caused material harm to those students and their parents.”

The episode has become the latest education culture-wars flashpoint for a school system — and a single school — that have long been at the center of political battles over education. The National Merit story went viral on conservative media sites in December, and Youngkin joined right-wing Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, to discuss the push for an investigation at TJ on Tuesday and his concerns that “hard work and achievement be valued in all Virginia schools.”

Youngkin publicly opposed the TJ admissions process changes on the campaign trail, and he and Miyares have previously criticized Fairfax County Public Schools leadership for their focus on racial equity and inclusive policies for LGBTQ students.

Prior to Miyares’ announcement, Fairfax County Public Schools spokesperson Julie Moult said the schools are “ready to work with our partners at the state level” to understand why the error with the commendation letters at TJ occurred. The school division has also launched its own third-party independent probe into why the letter distribution slipped through the cracks, Moult noted. After the problem came to light in November, school staff called colleges and universities where commended students had already submitted applications to add the information to their admissions file.

FCPS did not immediately respond to DCist/WAMU’s request for comment regarding the investigation into TJ’s admissions process.

A larger debate over merit

The two controversies are linked by more than just Miyares’ new investigation. Both have now become the center of political arguments over the direction of public schools in Virginia and a multi-year movement to challenge local school boards’ decision-making.

Former TJ parent Asra Nomani is a writer and education advocate at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative nonprofit that has been involved in school culture-wars debates. Nomani, who first published an account of the delay, is also a founding member of the Coalition for TJ, the group that originally brought the federal legal challenge to TJ’s new admissions process.

Nomani — as well as Youngkin and Miyares — point to both issues as evidence of a once-great school and school system degraded by a hyperfocus on equity and student social-emotional wellbeing instead of academic achievement. Youngkin has frequently blamed equity-related policies for problems in public schools.

Nomani sees events at TJ as an indicator of a national “war on merit,” an attempt to lower academic standards in order to make it appear that all students are succeeding.

“In the fall of 2020, activists and bureaucrats in Fairfax County Public Schools went after TJ as the crown jewel in America’s educational system, because if they could destroy the merit admissions test to the number one high school in America, they could go after merit everywhere else,” she said.

“Equity has been hijacked as a concept in order to dumb kids down,” she argued.

She said the conflict is an attack on the hard work of Asian-American and immigrant students and their families.

“Most of the names at TJ are Asian American kids. So when they went after T.J., they were going after our families,” she said. “When they erased our names as commended students, then they erased mostly Asian names.”

Other parents at TJ disagree with the idea of a “war on merit.” Some see the delay in handing out letters of commendation — which they note, are a small portion of an overall college application — as a regrettable error, one that the school system has sought to fix. Some of the same parents, along with organizations like the TJ Alumni Action Group, have welcomed the push for greater diversity and support for emotional wellbeing in the TJ student body.

“This is about TJ maintaining academic excellence while being more open and inclusive, promoting social emotional learning, and preparing our students for 21st century skills like teamwork and critical thinking. It’s also about including students from low-income families, which will represent 25 percent of the incoming class, as opposed to the usual 2 percent,” a letter signed by a group of TJ parents and published in The Connection newspaper in 2021 reads.

Others said they believe the letters of commendation issue has been blown out of proportion to “stoke racial resentment and grievance,” Cindy Gersony, the former head of the school’s Parent Teacher Student Association, said in an email.

“There is absolutely no ‘equity issue’ involved at all,” Gersony said. “[TJ leaders] are not racists, and they are not anti-Asian, and they did not ‘deliberately withhold’ any awards.”

The new investigation follows another statewide probe — which Youngkin called for on his first day in office — into a neighboring Northern Virginia school system that provoked a firestorm of political controversy. In December, a grand jury report into the mishandling of a pair of sexual assaults in Loudoun County Public Schools led to the firing of the superintendent and unearthed an entrenched culture of silence around sexual assault — though the grand jury largely absolved the Loudoun school board, a body which was a frequent political punching bag for Youngkin and other Republicans in the 2021 gubernatorial race.

Delayed commendations

Typically, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation sends commendation letters, which recognize students who performed extremely well on the PSAT but who did not qualify as semifinalists in the National Merit scholarship program, to high schools in September, and the high schools distribute them. But this year, TJ awardees reportedly didn’t receive them until mid-November, after some colleges’ early application deadlines were past.

The National Merit Scholarship competition recognizes about 50,000 students out of the 1.5 million juniors who take the test each year. Of the 50,000, about 34,000 are commended scholars, who are not eligible to advance in the competition for prestigious National Merit scholarships. But they may become recipients of “special scholarships,” funded by businesses and given to about 800 students each year.

The delay at TJ in the fall of 2022 was the result of a mistake from the Corporation — which didn’t include enough postage on the original envelope containing the letters — combined with what FCPS has referred to as a “human error,” where TJ Principal Ann Bonitatibus signed the letters shortly after the school received them but they were not distributed to students for several more weeks.

Bonitatibus and Fairfax superintendent Michelle Reid met with TJ parents on Tuesday night to address the problem further.

The same problem did not affect National Merit semifinalists, whose names FCPS celebrates in a public announcement each year.

“We are committed to sharing any key findings and any updates to our processes to ensure future consistency in appropriate and timely notification of National Merit Scholarship Corporation recognitions going forward,” an FCPS public statement on the matter acknowledged.

“I’m happy that the attorney general’s looking at it. I’m also really happy that Dr. Reid is looking at it as well from the superintendent’s perspective,” said Shawnna Yashar, the parent of a TJ senior who discovered that her son received his delayed commendation letter in November and first alerted the school to the problem. “Hopefully then moving forward, the process will be more clear and more unified across Fairfax County Public Schools so that all kids get their awards on time, and are able to use them and celebrate them with their families.”

Yashar described a lengthy back-and-forth with TJ leadership over the issue (Nomani has published email correspondence on the issue, which Yashar confirmed was hers). Yashar also said she needed to press the school and FCPS administration to get staff to call and add the commendation to students’ college application files.

“I don’t think that it necessarily makes or breaks an application, but it might be that little bit when you have two applications that look incredibly similar, it might be that part that just pushes one student into the accept pile,” she said.

Yashar said she had no indication from her conversations with school staff that the delay in releasing the letters had been racially motivated. She did not comment when asked if she sees the issue as an indicator of a tug of war between academic excellence and equity at the school.

Yashar also recounted her discussion with the TJ student services director, who she said had raised the concern that handing out the letters would cause students who didn’t receive them to feel bad.

“I respectfully disagree that you can’t celebrate students both for their individual accomplishments, but also for who they are as people,” Yashar said. “I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive.”

Yashar is a lawyer who represented two local parents’ organizations in a friend of the court brief supporting the Coalition for TJ’s legal fight against the new admissions process. The brief expressed concerns over how the new admissions process would handle students who are both academically gifted and have special needs, or “twice exceptional” students.

Nomani, who first published Yashar’s story, suggested the commendation letters problem is more widespread than the botched letter distribution this fall. She said she had been in touch with “dozens” of students and their families from other years who also claimed to have not been notified. And she counted herself in that number: Nomani said she only discovered that her son, a recent TJ graduate, had received a National Merit commendation when she reached out to officials with the National Merit program as part of writing her story. (An FCPS spokesperson told The Washington Post that FCPS records show that National Merit commended students in Nomani’s son’s year were notified by email in September.)

“It is even more important to be able to share with college admissions officers that you are in the top 3% in the nation because you may be in that bottom quarter at TJ and you have to show somehow that you are a high academic achiever,” Nomani said.

The delay in distributing the letters has touched off calls from Nomani and a coalition of parent groups for the firing of TJ’s principal and its student services director. The coalition, called Save Merit, is not a nonprofit, according to Nomani, but it does unite several of the most active organizations that have created political pushback to area schools. It includes the Coalition for TJ, as well as Fight For Schools, the organization behind a series of unsuccessful recall campaigns against Loudoun County School Board members. The Chinese American Parents Association of Northern Virginia, Hispanics for STEM, and the American Hindu Coalition are also involved.

In addition to firings and a legal investigation, the group is also calling for the state Department of Education to set policy for making National Merit recognitions public across the commonwealth. Nomani said she expects the coalition to expand to take on other examples of anti-merit activity in schools nationally.

Nomani has previously called for Bonitatibus’s resignation over a lesson at TJ that addressed systemic racism, which Nomani characterized as “critical race theory” and against school policy.

Some local parents agree with concerns that the episode is an attack on merit. The Fairfax County Parents Association pointed to the problem as an indication of “watering down academic excellence” at the school in favor of equity policies.

“The incident with the Merit Commendations at TJ is a concerning example of disregarding academics in favor of social engineering,” the group, which has been critical of FCPS’ pandemic reopening and equity policies, said in an emailed statement.

But other TJ parents sharply disagree with that view. While they acknowledge that parents at the highly competitive school have a right to be frustrated with the delayed letters — particularly in the middle of a stressful college application season — they are unconvinced that the problem merits further scrutiny.

“It’s not clear to me there’s a real harm associated with the mistake,” said TJ parent Elaine Maag, whose child is a senior. Maag called the problem “unfortunate” and empathized with families’ stress over college applications, but pointed out that most TJ seniors also submit “extraordinary” SAT scores to colleges, making the commendation for a high PSAT score redundant.

“There’s a group of parents who’ve been very vocal about being unhappy with other changes at TJ. The admissions changes are a point of great consternation for some people,” Maag said. “I guess this felt more like this small group of parents that were already angry, are angry again. I certainly don’t want to minimize their anger. It’s real. But it wasn’t clear to me what the real issue is.”

Makya Little, a TJ alum who is now running for a seat in the House of Delegates, released a statement criticizing the investigation as a waste of time and taxpayer resources.

“Students in the commonwealth should have the liberty to learn free from worry about controversies manufactured by a small group of unqualified, divisive opportunists seeking power,” Little said.

Maag praised the TJ school administration, particularly Principal Bonitatibus, for their recent approach to the school’s culture, which she characterized as “caring” and concerned about students’ stress levels.

“It can be intimidating going to a school like TJ, and I have really appreciated that voice of her’s to say, ‘We’re here for you,’” Maag said.

This story has been updated to more accurately characterize Asra Nomani’s political stance.