Little praises TJ admissions changes, calls for higher pay, culture change in law enforcement

Editors note: This is the latest in a series of articles featuring candidates running in Virignia’s June 20, 2023, Primary Election.

Makya Little, 41, is running in a June 20 Primary Election to be the Democrat nominated by her party to run for the newly-created 19th District Virginia House of Delegates seat. The seat has no incumbent. Little has two Primary opponents, Natalie Shorter, and Rozia Henson.

The district leans strongly toward Democrats and includes a portion of Woodbridge in Prince William County and a portion of southern Fairfax County. Find your polling place.

Little followed in her mother’s footsteps and worked at the FBI for 16 years, first as a graphic designer and later as a program analyst. She retired in 2022 after 16 years to run for office.

Little is a single mother with three children in Prince William County Public Schools, ages 13, 14, and 15.

I interviewed Little about her race. You can see the entire interview video here.

Regarding transportation, what are the unmet needs in the 19th District? 

“Transportation and traffic is the number one issue concerning this district, between the auto train and what that does to the Route 1 corridor, between the lack of access to slug lots and the construction that is constantly ongoing but never coordinated, across entities, across counties that back Route One beyond and that Occoquan bottleneck on I-95. There’s just so many between utilities, between developers, between just so many projects, and the two boards of county supervisors that don’t really communicate. So you have bus rapid transit being discussed and planned on the Fairfax side, and then what happens when that gets to Prince William? No one is serving as a bridge. No one is serving as a bridge for this district.

The intersection of Route 123 and Route 1, and nearby I-95 in Woodbridge, is one of the most connected transportation hubs in all of Prince William County, with a Virginia Railway Express station and multiple nearby commuter lots. When you say, there’s a lack of access, what more could be done in that area to provide more options for people who need to get where they’re going?

“I believe that there can be infrastructure around the slugging process. Absolutely. I mean, I remember when Horner Road was just that one single front lot, and since then, I’ve seen infrastructure get added to the Pentagon where there’s signage. I remember someone tried to, just on their own time, create Sluglines.com. They were, like I said, doing it as volunteers. But if we actually put state-level funding around that and created an app where we allowed for communication between drivers and riders, I feel like there could be some optimization there.”

Would you like to see the state take over sluglines.com?

“Yes. Especially when you consider the[National Christmas Tree] lighting ceremony or an accident that shuts down I-95 and riders are scrambling, trying to figure out, okay, well, if I take the Metro to Springfield, then how will I get back to whichever lot I commuted from? It’s really just removing barriers from communication between riders, drivers, and other transportation entities to make sure that traffic and people are flowing seamlessly.”

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is your alma mater, and you said that you were on the front lines of change in the admissions process to allow more students to attend the school based on where they attended middle school. What do you say to those people who say that the admission standards were weakened in that change?

“It’s flat-out false, and the data are what the data are. If you really look at the data, you’ll see that the demographic that was impacted the most was actually socioeconomic. Prior to the changes, only zero point 62% of students admitted to TJ were socioeconomically disadvantaged. That is extreme from the county average. Wherever you go in Fairfax or Prince William or any of the feeder counties, it’s probably around 31% is the average of the student body student population.”

“Once we removed a statistically significantly discriminatory exam which didn’t test for merit. It tested for access to resources. We already have a system that tests for merit called grades. And even at the collegiate level, colleges have recognized that grades are a better indicator of long-term success than standardized, quote unquote tests that you essentially have to prepare for to even take.”

What do you mean when you say “testing for access to resources?”

“The test you basically had to take a prep class to learn how to take the exam, the same way you do with the LSAT or the SAT. And so if you don’t have the resources to learn how to take that test, you’re not going to do well on that test.”

Where do you stand on school choice?

I don’t think there’s an all-or-none situation. I think there’s a balance. There is a need for what I’ll call specialty schools such as TJ, where there are students who are extremely gifted in certain areas or extremely passionate about certain topics, and having the opportunity to kind of develop or accelerate the development of those skills is necessary. However, we can’t go all completely to charter schools, and we can’t go all completely to public schools. But you can’t starve public schools of resources and expect public schools to live up to the expectation that they’ve had since their inception, which is to allow economic mobility of Americans.”

What do you say to those parents who say competition spurred by school choice would force underperforming schools to improve?

“Schools within the same district can’t necessarily be competitive against one another. It requires a school board to again balance out the access to resources because now, again, you’re creating a bigger divide that is counter to the purpose of public education. Everyone’s entitled to equal education if you’re imbalancing resources, whether that’s programs, whether that’s funding, or whether that’s facilities.”

The violent crime in Prince William County has been up 70% since 2019. At the same time, we’ve seen a natural wave of retirements in the police Prince William County Department while it and departments across the U.S. struggle to hire new officers. Since the death of George Floyd in 2020, it’s never been a more challenging or complex time for police officers. So if you’re elected, what will you do in the state legislature to help law enforcement protect the communities they serve?

“I think there’s two sides to that. One is definitely making the field more attractive through pay and access to resources. But another one is ensuring accountability. There’s a culture within law enforcement that definitely deters some from applying and there’s relationships that I feel can and should be fostered at the school level where, I mean, career days, we have SROs that are literally there, but how often do they share with students what their career options are in law enforcement?

“It’s contentious because relationships aren’t being built and fostered, but I feel like it’s hard for any entity investigating itself to find against itself. And that’s where it’s a balance of law enforcement accountability.”

Would you support legislation that would see more police review boards with members of the public serving on them to review the actions and cases of the police departments across Virginia and how they do their job?

“I actually feel it should be a top-down approach instead of because it’s important that you do understand law enforcement culture if you’re going to quote, unquote, judge it right. Like as a former FBI employee, I understand the FBI’s culture. If I’m not familiar with that culture, I can’t ask certain questions. I don’t know where the bodies are buried. I don’t know what’s the norm. Right. And so what I genuinely feel has to happen is if there is an issue or a complaint at local law enforcement level, the state law enforcement entity should be the ones investigating that.”