Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is alleging that a Fairfax County middle school discriminated against students based on race, color, and national origin in an email sent to families regarding a college preparatory program offered by the county.

Miyares sent a letter to the principal at Cooper Middle School and Fairfax County Public Schools on Thursday afternoon, suggesting that the school could be in breach of the equal protection clause of the Constitution and the Virginia Human Rights Act, which prohibit such discrimination.

The attorney general has made similar allegations against FCPS in the past. The school district is the commonwealth’s largest, and a frequent target for conservative criticism of public schools.

“It’s shocking that we continue to find such blatant examples of racial and ethnic discrimination in the Fairfax County Public School System. Every student should be able to apply for the College Partnership Program and have the same opportunities as their peers, regardless of race,” said Attorney General Miyares in a press release. “I demand that Cooper Middle School, its administrators, and anyone involved in this program stop this illegal discrimination immediately.”

A statement from Fairfax County Public Schools called Miyares’ assertions “false and damaging.”

The crux of the issue this time is an email sent to families at Cooper Middle School on March 1, which encouraged students to apply for the county’s College Partnership Program.

The email, as quoted in Miyares’ release, reads:

“Do you have an 8th grader who WANTS to go to college AND Do they fall into one or more of these categories?

• Students who are the first in their family to attend college in the U.S.
• Black or African American students
• Hispanic students, of one or more race
• Students with disabilities
• English learners
• Economically disadvantaged students

“If you do, PLEASE APPLY for Fairfax County’s College Partnership Program.”

Miyares said the email constituted “soliciting and selecting applicants … based on race, color, and national origin,” and threatened a potential lawsuit if the school does not produce evidence that they have retracted the original email and are administering the program in a nondiscriminatory way within six business days.

According to an FCPS spokesperson, the school later sent out a second email. “We apologize for any language pertaining to candidacy and the link to further information on the website that were omitted from the original message,” the email said.

The College Partnership Program is designed to “increase the number of students, particularly first-generation and traditionally underrepresented students, that enroll and succeed in college,” according to the FCPS website. The program provides accepted students with additional academic advising, regular meetings, parent education sessions, SAT prep help, and college visits.

Language on the website lays out a number of characteristics that make up the “typical” student in the program, including being part of certain underrepresented racial groups as well as prospective first-generation college students, English language learners, disabled students, and low-income students. Like the email, the site does not explicitly exclude white or Asian-American students from applying; it doesn’t mention them at all.

But that’s not to say that students in those groups aren’t applying and being accepted. Following Miyares’ letter, FCPS posted the racial and ethnic breakdown of students in the program over the last three school years. In the current program, 8.7% of students are white and 17.4% are Asian. Black students account for 28% and Hispanic students are 43% of the participants. By far the largest category is students on free and reduced price lunch, who make up 59% of the program.

“We are disappointed that no one from the Office of the Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Virginia contacted Fairfax County Public Schools to check on the authenticity of these reports,” said an FCPS media statement responding to Miyares’ inquiry. “Instead, false and damaging public accusations against Cooper Middle School have been made.”

“Publishing false narratives like this undermines public school efforts to boost U.S. educational achievement,” the statement continued.

It’s not the first time Miyares has made such an argument against Fairfax County Public Schools. In January, he launched a two-part investigation of Thomas Jefferson High School For Science And Technology (TJ), a prestigious magnet school, arguing that a failure to notify students of a National Merit commendation was discriminatory against Asian-American students, who make up the majority of the TJ student body.

The second part of the attorney general’s investigation is examining whether TJ’s new admissions process — which admits students based on standing in their middle school class, not scores on an admissions test — also discriminates against Asian-American students. The new admissions process resulted in the most diverse incoming class in TJ’s recent history.

The Office of the Attorney General has since broadened the National Merit part of the inquiry to encompass all of Fairfax County Public Schools. A spokesperson for Miyares did not comment on the status of the original Fairfax inquiry, citing an ongoing investigation.

The Cooper Middle School email and the concerns over the delay in releasing National Merit commendation letters were both first reported in The Fairfax Times by Asra Nomani, a writer and education advocate at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative nonprofit that has also been involved in school culture-wars debates over masks, critical race theory, and trans students in athletics. Nomani is also a former TJ parent and a founding member of the Coalition for TJ, a group that brought an as-yet unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge to the new TJ admissions policy.

Nomani compared the Cooper Middle School email to the U.S.’s long history of legal discrimination against Asian immigrants and called it “a signal of the institutional racism Asian American youth are increasingly facing in education nationwide.”

The story was quickly picked up in conservative outlets like The Daily Mail, which ran the headline “Will they EVER learn? School that’s part of notoriously woke Virginia district bans white and Asian students from college prep program, despite sister school facing AG probe for withholding merit awards to boost ‘equity.’”

Miyares’ letter landed just ahead of a politically significant CNN town hall appearance by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who spoke to a live audience of parents, students, and CNN anchor Jake Tapper about public education issues on Thursday night. Youngkin has reportedly been mulling a presidential run in 2024, though he dodged questions about the possibility at the event. Recent polling shows even Virginia Republicans are mostly uninterested in Youngkin as a presidential candidate compared to Donald Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.