Last month, Ann Bonitatibus announced that she was resigning from her position as principal of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), a magnet school located in Fairfax County, Virginia, the state’s largest school district.
Before her leadership, TJ was the top-ranked high school in the nation for about a decade. Bonitatibus aided in the overhaul of TJ’s selection process in 2020 from merit to equity, thereby compromising the once highly prestigious school’s rigor, and sinking its ranking from first to 14th in the nation on its undoubted freefall journey.
Prior to the admissions changes in 2020, which were explicitly implemented to reduce the number of Asian Americans and racially balance the student population, TJ leadership selected students across the region based on an admissions exam, grades, test scores, and aptitude for mathematics. Following the policy change, admissions are now based on middle school quotas, admissions essays that have little to nothing to do with STEM and can be subject to viewpoint discrimination, and a low-level cut-off grade point average of 3.5.
Consequently, this year, following the graduation of the final class of merit-selected students, the school notably had fewer than half the number of national merit semi-finalists that it had under the merit-based admissions system, and its lowest number in over a decade.
Not only did Bonitatibus facilitate the destruction of the once flagship institution by lowering its standards for admission, TJ administrators also handed over blueprints and student research projects to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has since cloned the school by the dozens in China.
In fact, the timing of her resignation suggests that Bonitatibus likely resigned from her position in the middle of the school year as a result of these controversies with the CCP, which some have even considered to be traitorous. Bonitatibus and others destroyed America’s premiere public school, while helping China to replicate what it once was.
Failing Upwards
Instead of sending Bonitatibus packing for her obvious failures, Michelle Reid, the district’s far-left superintendent, promoted Bonitatibus to the district’s headquarters, referred to as “Gatehouse,” leading many to suggest that Reid is ushering the way for the former principal to “fail up.”
Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager, rightly noted on X, “Strong leaders hire team members that are smarter than they are. Weak leaders hire weak direct reports.”
Reid’s promotion of Bonitatibus is a clear case of weak leadership. Ironically, after Bonitatibus’ central role in helping the elected school board members destroy TJ in the name of equity, and then passing its information to the CCP, Reid announced that Bonitatibus would be the district’s executive director of talent acquisition and management. Given the performance of TJ after the admissions changes, this decision says a lot about Reid and her poor judgment.
A History of Hiring Lemons
But Bonitatibus is not the first person to fail up under Reid. Reid has selected many people with questionable records and judgement. For example, she hired Nardos King, also a failed principal, to be the district’s chief equity officer. When King was the principal of Mt. Vernon High School in Alexandria, Virginia, she placed an ad for Body Magic, a product she sold, in the school’s yearbook. It claimed that the product would give users a slimmer waistline and enhance their sex lives.
Parents were justifiably outraged that a principal would endorse such a product for their children to use. In a community forum following the incident, a resident foreshadowed what was to come, “They won’t fire her. They’ll promote her to a position at Gatehouse.” And eventually, Reid did exactly that.
Reid also hired administrators from a failed district for leadership roles in Fairfax County Public Schools. In March 2023, the Texas Education Agency announced that the state was removing Houston Independent School District’s leadership and taking charge of the state’s largest school district due to its poor performance over multiple years. Following that change, Reid imported several former administrators from Houston’s failing school district to Fairfax County. These include, but are by no means limited to, Geovanny Ponce, William Solomon, and Pablo Resendiz. They helped sink Houston’s district, and now they’re ushering in an era where several of Fairfax County’s schools are likely to lose accreditation.
Being the superintendent of a school district with about 181,000 students and a $3.7 billion budget is a demanding job, as evidenced by Northern Virginia Magazine’s rating of Reid as the second most influential person in Virginia, following Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Surrounding herself with competent staff is paramount. And yet, she has not.
Fairfax County’s school board is set to consider extending Reid’s contract until 2028 at this Thursday’s school board meeting. The new contract would give Reid a $424,146 annual salary and a $12,000 annual car allowance.
Ackman is right. You can tell a lot about a person by their recruits. Reid reveals her incompetence by selecting district administrators with a litany of failures. Bonitatibus is top among them.
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor to The Federalist and the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.
