FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA- Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) is vowing to look into a report published by National Review alleging administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County sold the school’s intellectual property to the Chinese communists.
The bombshell allegation came about after Parents Defending Education claimed Thursday that a nonprofit affiliated with the high school, run in part by the school’s administration, signed contracts with three Chinese Communist Party-linked entities to sell the school’s intellectual property in exchange for $3.6 million in cash payments.
Thomas Jefferson is one of the country’s leading technology, engineering, and math high schools. Last year, the communist nation mirrored it under a program called the “Thomas Schools.” It didn’t appear they were even trying to hide it. The report says that Chinese officials were trying to “clone” the Virginia school and achieved success with the help of Thomas Jefferson officials.
Under the deal, Chinese delegations were provided with the school’s curriculum, syllabi, and floor plans and were given guided tours of the schools. Thomas Jefferson bragged the Chinese officials were “foreign partners.”
The deal has gotten the attention of Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
“Governor Youngkin has been clear about the extent of the deeply disturbing efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate educational institutions in the United States,” Youngkin’s press secretary Christian Martinez said to National Review. “Today’s reporting raises new questions about the nature of the CCP’s efforts to use the TJ Partnership Fund to influence students and obtain intellectual property, as well as what local school division officials knew about the relationship. The Virginia Department of Education will get to the bottom of this.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Commonwealth of Virginia Attorney General’s Office told National Review that they “are aware of the issue and will be placing it under review.”
While school administrators claim the Chinese payments are “donations,” documents suggest otherwise. Parents Defending Education (PDE) obtained documents that were shared with National Review that refer multiple times to “contracts” made with Chinese entities. That would seem to suggest that the $3.6 million that the Partnership Fund, a 501(c)(3), called “charitable contributions,” could instead be subject to taxes.
“FCPS employees and staff bent over backwards to provide foreign donors unprecedented access to the inner workings of what was once the country’s premier secondary school–a courtesy that, strangely, has not been extended to either parents or taxpayers who underwrote such innovation,” PDE president Nicole Neily told National Review this week. “TJ’s formula for success was handed over to CCP-linked officials for a few million dollars in donations and a handful of junkets for staff–a bargain basement price and one that should have triggered alarm bells at the district, state, and federal levels.”
The news hit Virginia Senate candidate Hung Cao (R-VA), a member of Thomas Jefferson High School’s inaugural class, pretty hard. He said it is “heartbreaking to see my alma mater continue to fall.”
“Now they are helping the Chinese Communist Party,” Cao said. “The CCP poses a direct threat to Virginians and our public schools. Instead of helping America’s enemies and embracing Xi Jinping, our schools need to focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic. Republicans continue to fight against communism and to keep China’s influence out of Virginia.”
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