FCPS Must Keep Children Safe During New Middle School “Recess”

Last week, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) ) approved a measure to implement “recess” for middle school students. According to FCPS’s new plan, middle school students will get daily “recess”– 15-30 minutes of unstructured time.

According to that proposal, students would have that time to go outside and play, sit with friends on picnic benches, visit the library, or do homework. While any action to help children’s mental health is welcome, FCPS must have adequate safety and security protocols for students during this unstructured time.

Middle School and high school have always been difficult times. In recent years, experts have noticed a spike in mental health-related issues for students, with the US Surgeon General issuing a mental health advisory for school-aged students late last year. Shatter the Silence FCPS supports efforts to improve the mental health of our children, which is indeed at a crisis level.

Published research by medical professionals demonstrates that unstructured time, such as lunch and recess, is when most bullying and sexual harassment occurs. The problem is especially severe for middle school students. Before giving 12-14-year-old students swaths of unstructured time, FCPS must ensure that it has adequate safety policies to keep students safe, especially from sexual misconduct and abuse. However, FCPS has previously failed at providing children with even minimal security.

As we have detailed extensively, FCPS has a long-standing issue with human trafficking, admitting in a 2021 resolution that it has seen trafficking in “every high school and many middle schools.” While much of this occurs in the shadows, there are multiple reports of adults from the community breaking into schools to assault children sexually. Some of these individuals are convicted human traffickers. There have been no less than 800 trafficking cases involving school aged girls despite only about a dozen related prosecutions. Yet despite this record, FCPS doesn’t even have a basic anti-trafficking regulation or response protocol, and staff remains largely untrained on this topic, despite clear guidance from the US Department of Education on implementing such a policy.

Aside from the extreme example of human trafficking, FCPS struggles to handle even simple allegations of sexual misconduct. According to the Fairfax Youth Survey, students reported about 1600 cases of student-on-student sexual misconduct to school officials last year (FCPS does not poll students about staff-student misconduct). FCPS reported less than 50 such such instances to the Virginia Department of Education, as required by law. Only 20 of these 1600 reports resulted in disciplinary hearings – less than 2%.

A petition asking the Attorney General and US Department of Justice to investigate FCPS for ignoring sexual misconduct has gathered 22,000 signatures. A lack of action or insufficient remedies by FCPS has led to a bevy of federal investigations by the US Department of Education over the last decade and repeated media coverage with no change by the district in handling these complaints. In just the past two months, students at six separate high schools have walked out of class to protest FCPS’ indifference to sexual misconduct.

While FCPS puts out fancy, edited videos about its safety systems, the reality is that FCPS struggles to implement even basic security measures in schools that many would take for granted in business establishments. For example, FCPS is slow-walking the installation of security cameras in its schools. It does not have a student badge system so that security personnel can quickly identify who is and is not a student. FCPS safety audits are sporadic and informal at best, with the (supposedly) independent auditor not having conducted an inquiry into physical safety and security since at least 2019. FCPS fails to lock the doors in many of its schools. FCPS’s memorandum of understanding with the Fairfax County Police does not mention trafficking and only mentions sex crimes in passing.

The picture on social media is not much better. One does not have to look far to find multiple pages of children detailing horrible accounts of better. One does not have to look far to find multiple pages of children detailing horrible accounts of sexual abuse and bullying, and discrimination. Dozens of FCPS students have bravely shared their stories on Twitter, Instagram, and other channels – hoping someone will hear their cries for help. While FCPS recently entered into a six-figure no-bid contract with a firm to help them monitor social media, this appears to target dissident parents rather than harassed and bullied children.

So, while it’s commendable to establish a policy giving middle school children a mental health break, FCPS must first implement appropriate safety procedures and protections to ensure this unstructured chunk of time does not become an opportunity for physical and emotional pain and injury for our children. The district must install security cameras, control access to schools by ensuring doors are locked, and conduct regular, rigorous security audits. It also means training staff to recognize the signs of bullying, sexual harassment, and abuse and the proper ways to handle any of these issues.