Parents’ anger boiled over Tuesday night. The school board cut its meeting short and one man was arrested.
There has been no shortage of them this year. Parents explain why.
I t was in late January when the angry dad in a stocking hat and the grey, hooded sweatshirt took to the podium at a meeting of the school board in Loudoun County, Va.
Everyone on the board should be fired, he declared. The DMV was more efficient.
At the time, the schools in the wealthy Washington, D.C., suburb were still closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and parents like Brandon Michon were boiling with frustration.
“You’re a bunch of cowards hiding behind our children as an excuse for keeping schools closed,” a visibly angry Michon told the board members. “The garbage workers who pick up my freaking trash risk their lives every day more than anyone in this school system. Figure it out!”
The clip of Michon’s tirade went viral. For many people across the country, it was likely the first time that they’d ever heard of Loudoun County, much less paid any mind to its school board.
But in the months since, the community has remained in the national spotlight. Loudoun County – the richest county in the country, according to Forbes – has emerged as ground zero in the cultural battles that are spilling into the nation’s schools.
Over the last six months, debates have raged in Loudoun, not only about reopening schools, but over a variety of heated topics. Can the school board compel teachers to refer to transgender students by their preferred gender pronouns, even if some teachers claim that doing so violates their religious beliefs? Was Dr. Seuss actually an anti-black and anti-Asian racist unfit to be honored in schools? Is it okay for teachers to assign students to read books containing graphic sex and violence?
And, of course, there were heated debates about the district’s effort to root out “white supremacy” and to be more “racially conscious.” It’s an effort that many parents see as a blatant attempt to inject critical race theory into their children’s classrooms. That debate got a shot in the arm in November, when the attorney general’s office found that the Loudoun Academies, an elite STEM “magnet” school in the county, discriminated against minority teachers and students and ordered the district to enter a “conciliation” process with the local NAACP chapter.
At one point, school board members joined other like-minded progressives in private Facebook groups, where they plotted ways to silence parents opposed to their equity efforts. In response, a group of conservative parents launched a campaign to recall those board members.
The acrimony came to a head Tuesday, when a meeting over the district’s transgender policy turned fiery. The board unanimously shut down public comments after only 51 of the roughly 250 scheduled speakers had a turn at the podium. Parents refused to leave. They sang the Star-Spangled Banner. One man was arrested, and another was issued a summons for trespassing.
#loudouncounty parents signing Star Spangled Banner after school board shut down public comment because of applause. pic.twitter.com/vqBLxm5JKH
— Ian Prior (@iandprior) June 22, 2021
Patti Menders, one of the conservative parents who has fought against the school board, acknowledges that Tuesday’s meeting “did get a little too much.” But she’s happy to see so many people finally engaged with local politics and standing up to the board, which has been making a sharp left turn for at least a couple of years.
Menders has also filed suit against the district for allegedly discriminating against students who disagree with what she sees as its progressive racial-justice agenda
“You’ve got parents waking up. That’s what it is,” said Menders, president of the local Republican women’s club and one of the Loudoun County parents who described their concerns about the school board to National Review. “The parents are waking up to this school board pushing this radical ideology.”
The Runaway-Slave Game
When the third-, fourth- and fifth-graders at Madison’s Trust Elementary School in Loudoun County showed up at gym class in early February 2019, they were informed they would be playing a game. As part of the game, they would work in groups to advance through an obstacle course. The obstacle course represented the Underground Railroad.
The students weren’t designated as “slaves” or “slave owners,” a school district spokesman told reporters. Nonetheless, the exercise became known in local and national media as the “runaway-slave game.” The local NAACP was lit up with complaints. The school’s principal wrote a letter to the community apologizing for the culturally insensitive game.
It turns out, the game was based on a 30-year-old Underground Railroad simulation promoted by anti-racist training groups. But as is often the case, the nuance between racism and anti-racism was difficult to discern, and the damage was done. This national black eye was further proof to many district leaders that Loudoun County schools had a racism problem.
“The game was a collaborative effort with the school. The principal knew. The whole staff knew,” said Ian Prior, a parent of two young children in Loudoun County who has helped lead the pushback against the school board. “The principal tweeted on the first day how great this was. Everyone was on board until the complaints, and then everybody clammed up. They threw the teachers under the bus.”
Prior, a former deputy public-affairs director at the U.S. Department of Justice who helped found the local group Fight For Schools, said that to understand the current conflicts involving the Loudoun County school board, it’s important to understand the board’s response to the “runaway-slave game,” because “that’s where all of this stuff began.”
In April 2019, two months after the controversial game, the district contracted with the Equity Collaborative, a California-based consulting firm that helps school systems “create educational equity.” The firm offers courses on critical race theory and on how to apply CRT “as a form of practice for interrupting systemic racism and creating more equitable learning environments.” For Loudoun County, the Equity Collaborative conducted a “systemic equity assessment,” which included a series of focus-group sessions and interviews at 24 local schools to examine the district’s “culture related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and race,” according to a district report.
The firm found that there was “a low level of racial consciousness and racial literacy” in the district and that the district’s discipline policies disproportionately have a negative impact on students of color. And, it reported, “many English Learners, Black/African-American, Latinx, and Muslim students have experienced the sting of racial insults/slurs or racially motivated violent actions.”
Prior was skeptical. He said the focus groups excluded white and Asian students and parents, and the Equity Collaborative’s report was filled with anonymous anecdotes and unsubstantiated allegations.
“There’s no methodology. They don’t put any data in there,” he said. “It’s impossible to know what questions were asked. Were they leading questions? Were they prepared questions? And there’s no verification on any of the accusations. It’s basically just accusations.”
Prior, who moved to Loudoun County in 2018 in part because of the schools, said he first started paying attention to all of this last summer, when the Washington Free Beacon reported that the district had teamed with the Southern Poverty Law Center to develop a social-justice-inspired curriculum for kids as young as kindergarten, with an emphasis on teaching about the history of slavery in the United States. A course guide encouraged teachers to create opportunities for young students to learn about “activism and action civics,” the Free Beacon reported.
Prior also took issue with a proposed policy that would prohibit teachers and staff from talking negatively about the district’s new equity commitment even outside of school — “that’s a First Amendment problem,” he said — and with an overly broad and vague dress-code policy banning offensive imagery.
Last summer, Prior made a Freedom of Information Act request for the district’s bills from the Equity Collaborative. He learned that the district had spent more than $422,000 for the firm’s services, a number he called “crazy.”
Prior said that while it may sound nice, “equity” — the goal of the school board and its consultants — is really an effort to achieve equal results for racial groups forced through policy mechanisms. To proponents of equity, western liberalism’s ideals of meritocracy, a strong work ethic, and equal opportunity perpetuate systemic racism, a view Prior rejects.
A School Board Goes Off the Rails
When Prior started attending school-board meetings last fall, he realized he wasn’t the only parent with concerns. But, he said, most of the other concerned parents weren’t focused on the district’s equity movement. Rather, he said, “it was overwhelmingly opening schools.”
Those concerns carried into the new year, when Loudoun’s schools remained shut. Irate parents, like Michon, started raising hell. Loudoun and nearby Fairfax County’s schools started reopening to in-person learning only in mid-February.
As a parent, this pandemic has brought forth some incredible challenges.
This dad has had enough, we all have. No real metrics to safely open the schools, while the SB continues to kick the can further down the road. Many parents feel just as he does. #LCPS #openschools pic.twitter.com/Oa1GxNMzsp
— Aliscia Andrews (@alisciaandrews) January 26, 2021
Menders said she initially was among the group of parents pushing to reopen the schools, but as that fight was happening, she also started receiving messages from her Republican club members concerned about racial extremism creeping into the local classrooms.
“As we’re home with our kids we start to see what is going on,” she said. “People are sending me screenshots, people are sending me videos of what teachers are teaching.”
The reopening parents soon found common ground with the anti-CRT crowd. Their growing movement concerned several Loudoun school-board members and progressive parents, who had started gathering in a private Facebook group, the “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County.” According to a report in the Daily Wire, the group included at least six Loudoun school-board members as well as school staff and elected officials, including the county prosecutor. The board members also had a private group dedicated to opening and closing schools.
In early March, school-board member Beth Barts posted, “I’m very concerned that the [anti-] CRT movement for lack of a better word is gaining support,” according to the Daily Wire.
She wrote that she wanted to “call out statements and actions that undermine our stated plan to end systemic racism,” the Daily Wire reported. And she wrote that “united, we can and will silence the opposition.” One parent in the group even suggested infiltrating the anti-CRT movement and employing “hackers who can either shut down their websites or direct them to pro-CRT/anti-racist informational webpages.”
“You had a quorum of school board members in there,” Prior said. “That is really when things just kind of went off the rails for the school board.”
In the early spring, Prior and about a half dozen other angry parents met on a neighbor’s back deck to discuss what to do next. Prior questioned whether having a majority of the school board meeting in a private Facebook group restricted by viewpoint was even legal. If nothing else, he said, it was evidence of neglect of duty, misuse of office, and incompetence, the legal bar for removing a board member from office.
That night they decided to launch Fight For Schools and the effort to recall a majority of the Loudoun school-board members, Prior said.
“We sat down and I just said, ‘Listen, this what I think we should do,’” Prior recalled. “I think people want this school board out. They’ve been terrible on every possible metric.”
Opening the Floodgates
The recall effort and the general fight against the Loudoun school board has continued to gain momentum over the last few months. Prior attributes much of that momentum to the board itself, which he described as “tone-deaf, tin-eared, and not understanding of the tidal wave that they are facing in their own community.”
There has been no shortage of viral moments. In March, Loudoun schools de-emphasized Dr. Seuss on Read Across America Day — held on Dr. Seuss’s birthday — because of “strong racial undertones” in many of his books. Earlier this month, a mom who grew up in communist China accused the board of training children to be “social-justice warriors” and to “loathe our country and our history.” Critical race theory, said Xi Van Fleet, “has its roots in cultural Marxism” and “should have no place in our schools.”
“Growing up in Mao’s China, all of this seems very familiar,” Van Fleet told the board.
But the event that really propelled the recall effort was in late May when Byron “Tanner” Cross, a physical-education teacher at a Leesburg elementary school, was suspended after he voiced opposition to a proposed district rule that would require faculty to acknowledge and address students by their preferred gender-identity pronouns.
“I love all of my students, but I will never lie to them regardless of the consequences,” Cross told the board. “I am a teacher, but I serve God first, and I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it’s against my religion.”
Cross was placed on leave. He sued the district, and a judge later ordered he be reinstated.
Prior said that before Cross spoke, their movement against the school board was focused more on the racial-equity fight. Since then, a new group of people more concerned with First Amendment issues, religious liberty, and gender issues has joined the movement, which continues to evolve. The large church where Cross is a member allowed Fight For Schools to collect recall signatures there. They collected thousands.
“When they put him on leave, the floodgates literally opened,” Prior said.
‘We Were Distracted, Apathetic’
Heading into Tuesday’s meeting, Prior said he held a mini-rally and warned his group that he expected supporters of the school board to show up in full force, including people being bussed in from outside the district. The first 15 speakers or so spoke in favor of the district’s transgender policy, he said, but then the opposition flooded the podium.
“It looked like a coordinated effort to stack the room with people supporting the school board,” Prior said. “We exposed that. We pushed that out, and I think that just fired up more people.”
Jon Tigges was one of the attendees who scuffled with police after the board cut off public comment and the meeting was declared an unlawful assembly. Tigges, who runs a local wedding-event business, doesn’t have any kids attending the Loudoun public schools, but he’s become increasingly involved in local and national politics because of the pandemic shutdowns last year. He had intended to speak Tuesday and refused to leave. Ultimately, he was given a summons for trespassing, but only after a “30-minute joyride in the back of a paddy wagon,” he said.
“When I am in a public forum, on public land, in a taxpayer publicly owned building, and invited to speak in a public forum, and I’m arrested for trespassing, that’s a problem there,” he said. “And unfortunately, even there, people continue to give ground to authoritarian intimidation.”
Two arrests made at the Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting after it was declared an unlawful assembly and some parents here to protest against critical race theory and a transgender policy refused to leave right away #CriticalRaceTheory pic.twitter.com/dsZDrqJ0Gp
— Gabriella Borter (@gabriellaborter) June 22, 2021
After all of the recent fireworks, there will be a six-week break before the next school-board meeting in August. In the meantime, Prior said, the members of Fight For Schools intend to ramp up their efforts to collect signatures for their recalls. They need anywhere from 800 signatures to about 11,000, depending on the specific board member they’re trying to recall.
Prior said there’s so much focus on national politics these days that too many people have stopped paying attention to local-government agencies, including their local school boards.
“I blame myself and I think other parents should look in the mirror and say, ‘Hey, we were distracted, we were apathetic,’” he said. “We just made assumptions, that your local school boards and your local school systems have the best interest of the students at heart, and they weren’t going to be infected with political ideology one way or the other.”