Fairfax County school board members say that the recently passed redistricting initiative is about transportation efficiency and overcrowding, but they’re lying to us. The equity-based boundary-drawing effort is intended to redistribute families with higher household incomes to schools with less resources, with what appears to be little regard for geography.

Earlier this week, after I posted one op-ed detailed passage of the district’s Policy 8130a friend reached out to me with credible information from Gatehouse of the school district head office. My friend informed me that there are preliminary redistricting maps that illustrate that Hunt Valley Elementary School, which is on the western edge of the West Springfield High School pyramid, will be redistricted to Lewis High School in East Springfield.

Such a change would be shocking because Hunt Valley is much further away from Lewis High School (5.9 miles) than it is West Springfield High School (3.3 miles). In fact, students living in the Hunt Valley area literally passed West Springfield High School on their way to Lewis High School when they doubled their commute to the school, although reduced commute time was one of the reasons cited by many school board members who supported redistricting.

Although my source was credible, I hoped to dispel the meaningless information as a rumor, so I immediately emailed my school board member, Sandy Anderson, and Assistant Superintendent Michelle Reid.

As I expected, Reid, the architect of this “fair access” policy, remained silent. Meanwhile, Anderson didn’t dispel the rumor either. She responded, “I also know that West Springfield and Irving are overcapacity, so something needs to be done to ensure that we can fix that regardless of any specific policy changes. That being said, one of the goals of updating the border policy was to allow for reduced bus traffic, commute time and transportation costs.”

“One of the targets” is the operative phrase.

During their public meeting, when school board members (including Anderson) voted against the grandfather clause for student stability in the redistricting process, they said efficiency was the goal while keeping quiet about their more pressing “fairness” goals looming in the background.

At one point during the meeting, Anderson stated that she “violently opposed” the notion that one school was better than another. The market doesn’t seem to agree. Just compare home prices in the West Springfield High School district to those in the Lewis High School district.

Sandy Anderson then voted against fellow board member Ricardy Anderson’s stability supplement for grandkids in their existing schools. For several of the school board members, it seems that stability and efficiency are reasonable prices to pay for fairness – as long as it’s not with their own children, I guess.

Sandy Anderson’s children are in a safe district and in one of the most reputable elementary schools in that pyramid. I doubt she would be willing to shuffle them to a lower rated school, especially not during their high school careers. She also may not realize what redistribution would do to the value of her home.

Six other school board members, Seema Dixit, Kyle McDaniels, Ryan McElveen, Ricardy Anderson, Mateo Dunne and Melanie Meren, also have children who attend or soon will attend Fairfax County Public Schools. Many of us are curious how these elected officials feel about their own children being used as guinea pigs and subjected to a massive stock experiment under Reid’s leadership. The remaining five members mainly have either grown children or no children at all.

If the redistricting policy was really about overcrowding and transportation efficiency, a situation that would actually motivate a school board to analyze boundaries, there shouldn’t be a single example of children being moved to a school further away from their home. The case of Hunt Valley Elementary School, and probably many others throughout the district, proves that district leadership is willing to uproot and move our children around like chess pieces for fairness, not efficiency.

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Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor to Washington Examinera mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.