Is your local school board doing the job it’s supposed to?
Is your local school board doing the job it’s supposed to?
F or nearly two years, teachers’ unions and school-district bureaucrats have told parents in Loudoun County, Va. — one of the richest suburbs in the nation — that there was nothing to the scandals swirling around “woke” lesson plans and the alleged sexual assault of students.
Now Loudoun’s liberal school board has suddenly fired its superintendent after a devastating grand-jury report concluded district officials lied and “the district was looking out for its own interests instead of the best interests of its students,” Fox News reported. According to the report, the cover-up that Loudoun officials engaged in “led to a stunning lack of openness, transparency, and accountability.”
The most infamous incident involved two sexual assaults by the same 15-year-old boy. The first one occurred in May 2021, when the boy — wearing a skirt — sodomized a female classmate in a transgender-friendly bathroom.
Scott Ziegler, the now-fired superintendent, told the school-board members the next month that he had no record of the incident.
The only punishment the 15-year-old boy suffered was to be transferred to another high school and face a requirement that he “write on a piece of paper that he would not commit such conduct again,” the grand-jury report noted. Several school-system officials knew that the student was the assailant in the May incident, it added, but “not a single person with knowledge of the student’s history or of this current action stepped in to do anything.”
In October, the student pulled a girl into an empty classroom and sexually assaulted her. He was finally taken into custody but after 14 days was released to his grandmother while his mother was away. The grandmother called his probation officer and said her grandson was a “sociopath” who “does not care about consequences.”
The assailant’s mother told the same probation officer that she had “been begging for help from the schools for a year,” but that the school system had discounted her “approach and recommendations with respect to his reasoning and actions.”
The assailant has since been convicted. His punishment is that he must attend a locked residential treatment facility until he turns 18 in 2024.
Scott Smith, the father of the first victim, tried to take the assailant’s actions public. He showed up a month afterward at a June 2021 school-board meeting to complain about the cover-up. Video shows him being dragged out of the meeting with a bloody mouth and in handcuffs after being beaten by security guards. He was then arrested.
Smith says he’s glad some of the truth has come to light, but he noted that the grand jury has so far pinned no criminal blame on the school or teachers.
Attorney General Jason Miyares, who impaneled the grand jury, told WTOP Radio: “The grand-jury report showed multiple instances where the Loudoun County public-school administrators dropped the ball.” He added that he hoped the report served as “a warning to every single school board in the Commonwealth” as an example of “what not to do” in a similar situation.
“The lack of accountability and the lack of transparency . . . was absolutely galling,” the attorney general concluded after assuring voters that the grand jury is still sitting, “and our office is considering all options.”
Angry parents are pointing out that the Loudoun school board fired Ziegler without citing any cause. Because of this, Ziegler will receive a severance package totaling $325,000, paid out in monthly installments.
The grand-jury report had concluded that Ziegler was informed about the May assault on the day it happened but that later, during a board meeting the following month, he lied about his knowledge of the event. A witness told the grand jury that this statement was a “bald-faced lie.”
The school board was complicit in the cover-up of the assaults. While it commissioned an independent review of the situation in October 2021, it refused to release the review to the public — even in redacted form — after it was completed in January 2022.
Andrew Holler, a former school-board member until earlier this year, said the board continued to stand by Superintendent Ziegler even though they had more than enough cause to lose confidence in him. “There wasn’t much new information in the Grand Jury report that I (can’t speak for others) didn’t already know,” he revealed in a damning post on Facebook.
In January 2024, the incoming governor, Glenn Youngkin, demanded a new investigation on his first day in office. The Loudoun school board’s response was to sue to stop the grand-jury probe, calling it politically motivated. The Virginia Supreme Court ruled the board’s position invalid, and the probe finally got under way.
The grand-jury report states that school districts must exercise “stronger leadership” and the culture has to change.
Christian Braunlich, head of the Thomas Jefferson Institute, says that the same is true all over Virginia and also in many other states. “From the beginning of their term, school-board members are told in training sessions held by the Virginia School Boards Association that their role is limited (‘hire the Superintendent, approve the budget, and support the schools’) and that they must speak in unity,” he told me. “It is time school-board members understood their role is not to sit down and shut up.”
If public-education officials in a district as civically active as Loudoun thought they could get away with covering up misdeeds, imagine what is happening in other districts, where such corruption never comes to light. Perhaps even in a district near you.