The 1776 Project PAC, a conservative group that recruits and funds anti–critical race theory school-board candidates across the country, unearthed a damning clip from Virginia’s Loudoun County:
Newly revealed 2020 and 2021 footage reveals Loudoun County school board member Brenda Sheridan talking about how parents should not know if their child is using different pronouns or a different name in school
pic.twitter.com/0PfcEWAvgt— 1776 Project Pac (@1776ProjectPac) December 20, 2022
The clip is more or less exactly what the tweet describes. In the audio, a Loudoun County school-board member can be heard explicitly arguing that “outing a student to their parents” is “not the role of the school division.” If a “student speaks to a counselor or a teacher or a mentor in the building, and that teacher picks the phone up and calls a parent,” she says, “that is not what we’re looking to happen.”
Loudoun County has been at the epicenter of the ongoing debates over CRT, gender ideology, and parents’ rights, largely because of the unabashed radicalism of many of its school-board members and administrators. The local public-education bureaucracy’s operating philosophy on these issues was inadvertently voiced by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe in 2021 — “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” McAuliffe made the mistake of saying the quiet part out loud, but, as clips like this one demonstrate, others in positions of power in the district have been saying it for years.