The Loudoun County school board fired Superintendent Scott Ziegler in a closed-door meeting Tuesday night after a special grand jury released a report blaming the district for failing to escalate cases of student sexual assault in 2021.
Many parents reportedly expressed dissatisfaction with Ziegler to the school board after an investigation ordered by Governor Glenn Youngkin found that the district mishandled an incident in which a female student was raped in a school bathroom, allowing the perpetrator to commit a second sexual assault after being transferred to another school within the district.
“So, reading that report was really hard and really difficult to swallow the fact that these are the people that are in charge,” Lauren Shernoff, a mother to children in Loudoun County told ABC7News, which first reported Ziegler’s firing.
The grand jury report found that Loudoun County Public Schools “failed at every juncture” in its handling of the multiple sexual-assaults allegedly perpetrated by the same male student, who identifies as “gender-fluid.”
Between May and October of 2021, the assailant allegedly sexually abused two females in the district. At Stone Bridge High School, the male student allegedly forcibly anally raped a female student in the girls’ bathroom while “wearing a skirt.” At Broad Run High School, where he was transferred after the first incident, he allegedly “abducted” a second victim into a classroom, nearly suffocated her, and sexually assaulted her, according to the report.
Last November, the Loudoun County sheriff accused Ziegler of placing the dangerous individual into the second high school despite being “unmistakably aware of the offense” at SBHS.
In a letter to sheriff Michael Chapman, Ziegler rebutted the allegations that the district was complicit in helping to facilitate more abuse, claiming that it “cannot confirm” that it was notified of charges from the sheriff’s office regarding the first case.
Chapman rejected his explanation as an excuse, reminding Ziegler that he “personally reported” the first incident to the school board the day it happened in May.
“Nothing in your letter addresses the following facts,” Chapman wrote to Ziegler. “That you knew of the alleged sexual offense the day it occurred. That despite a public statement at a School Board meeting on June 22, 2021 denying any knowledge of sexual assaults in any LCPS bathrooms, you sent an email on May 28, 2021 to members of the school board advising them of the incident — thus invalidating your public statement.”
“The consequences of that decision” to move the suspected student to another school, which Ziegler presided over, “resulted in a second student being victimized by the same defendant,” Chapman said.
Some parents said that they feel a confidence crisis with current leadership, given the report’s conclusion that the second incident could have been prevented if not for the district’s negligence.
“The one thing we want to count on is that our school system and the leadership is really working overtime to make sure that the things within their control are done well and always have safety first. And now that’s been shattered. So, what do we do next? We can’t trust the leadership in charge,” Shernoff told the outlet.
The special grand jury report said Ziegler lied during a school board meeting when he denied having knowledge of the sexual assaults. During a school-board meeting in which parents objected to a district policy allowing male students to use girls’ bathrooms, Ziegler insisted there hadn’t been any incidents related to the policy change. (Schools within the district had been allowing boys to use the girls’ bathroom before the policy officially took effect shortly after the first assault.)
While the report chiefly pegged responsibility on the district, it also noted a “breakdown of communication between multiple parties,” including the county sheriff’s office, the court services unit, and the county’s attorney’s office.
The report found that there was no coordinated cover-up between LCPS administrators and school-board members, who were in fact “deprived” of all the details until after the October 6 incident. They reportedly learned from public reporting that the assailant was the same in both cases when this information should have immediately come from the superintendent.
The 15-year-old student was convicted of two sexual assaults by a juvenile court judge and sentenced to a “residential program in a locked down facility.”