G&D: FCPS school board member Mateo Dunne rips district's handling of Hayfield football scandal

The Hayfield High School Football saga took another ridiculous twist on Monday, as FCPS Superintendent Michelle Reid announced that team has been pulled out of the VHSL playoffs (after a 75-7 quarterfinal win last Friday following their reinstatement), and athletic director Monty Fritts, who apparently knew about some of the shenanigans based on some text messages from earlier this year that were released, was placed on leave and eventually resigned his post.

Asra Nomani, who has been covering this for the Fairfax Times, had the latest on that for BMitch and Finlay on Tuesday, and later on, Fairfax County School Board member Mateo Dunne joined Grant & Danny to try to explain how things got this far…and placed the onus on Superintendent Reid.

“Trying to escape from this never-ending scandal…there are more questions than answers here. And while many great things have been accomplished under this superintendent, this scandal has been handled fairly incompetently from the get-go,” Dunne said. “There were rumblings as early as February when this coach was hired that something was amiss; the football community is small and we tend to talk, and we see from these texts that the athletic director was freely disclosing his plans, so it wasn’t exactly a well-planned conspiracy. And then, we had no action taken really until the summer – why did FCPS wait so long to start a serious investigation?”

He wondered that, as well as why FCPS didn’t hire outside counsel to investigate any of this.

“As a matter of course, FCPS routinely hires outside law firms for matters of much smaller scope or magnitude, but here you have perhaps the biggest local sports scandal in Fairfax County history, and maybe the Commonwealth, where you have 31 kids from other schools coming to Hayfield, and we try to do it in-house?” Dunne said. “We don’t have an in-house detective agency, or any capacity or expertise to do an investigation of this magnitude, so what was done was sloppy and thrown together at the last minute by the superintendent. Back in August, I called for an outside investigation, because hers was so sloppy, to get to the bottom of this before we got too far into the season. My motion lost 9-3 in deference to the Superintendent, and now here we are with new revelations hour by hour, and we seem to be in a tail spin.”

That’s why Dunne and two colleagues once again called for an outside investigation on Monday, which now has the backing of the City of Fairfax School Board and many constituents – and they want to have it done without Reid?

“We need to know what the facts are and chart a new path forward, and I’ve even called for the Superintendent and her legal counsel to be recused from the investigation, because I have a complete loss of confidence in her ability to navigate our way out of this scandal,” Dunne said.

Danny Rouhier seems to the think what happened back in the summer was a case of ‘there wasn’t much interest in finding anything out’ – and yeah, even Dunne at this point thinks all fingers point to a hasty cover-up at best and gross incomptence at worst.

“I have said since the beginning that there are two facts that are irreconcilable – one is we have 31 players transferring in to Hayfield, and while it’s true that for decades it’s happened one or two at a time and there have been rule violations in the past, there’s a difference between one or two and 31; that’s driving a truck through a loophole, not just skirting the edges,” Dunne said. “And the second is the fact that the Superintendent reached a finding that there’s nothing wrong with that. Common sense should’ve guided us rom the beginning that when a sloppy internal investigation finds that, the only conclusion is there’s something wrong with the internal investigation, or, people say it looks like a cover-up – and in this case, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, maybe it is a duck! I’m always hesitant to call a conspiracy, but what else can we call it at this point when we’re unwilling to have an impartial third party come in, tell us what’s what, and make recommendations how we can restore the integrity in our athletics program, and restore trust in our FCPS leadership.”

Dunne believes, even as it’s said the principal made the decision to pull Hayfield from the playoffs, that it was Reid’s call because ‘there’s no way the principal is going to try to back his way out of the scandal that started under his leadership and by his decisions.’

So, what happens now…and how do we clean this up going forward without making athletics similar to academic programs that allow kids to choose schools?

“Where we are right now, the VHSL gave ample opportunity to FCPS to clean house and we didn’t, so VHSL had to act. Some people criticize these rules as being vague, but no one had trouble complying with them previously, so maybe we do need to clarify the rules to say you can’t do something that’s blatantly illegal,” Dunne said. “And also, we need to strengthen enforcement so VHSL can impose penalties and hold schools accountable – but frankly, this is something FCPS should have cleaned up last spring, and there’s no reason we should have delayed all of this accountability until now.”

Take a listen to Dunne's entire call-in above.