How Loudoun County became the epicenter of the parental rights movement

Jeremiah Poff

December 18, 07:00 AM December 18, 07:00 AM

For the parents of Loudoun County Public Schools, the swift and sudden downfall of former Superintendent Scott Ziegler was a vindication two years in the making.

Ziegler was unceremoniously fired last week by the Loudoun County School Board, hours after a special grand jury report detailed that he and other administrators had "failed at every juncture" in responding to two sexual assaults that took place in May and October 2021 in two separate high schools in the northern Virginia school district. And earlier this week, a judge ordered the unsealing of three misdemeanor criminal indictments against Ziegler.

But the former superintendent's fall from grace was hardly the catalyst for establishing Loudoun County as the epicenter of the grassroots parental rights movement that has swept the nation over the past two years. Indeed, it only represented the latest development in a series of tragic episodes that ultimately gripped national headlines, influenced a governor's election, and culminated in criminal charges against two senior officials in the school district.

ANGRY PARENTS CONFRONT LOUDOUN COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD AFTER GRAND JURY REPORT

Roughly a 45-minute drive sans traffic from Washington, D.C., Loudoun County, Virginia, ranks among the wealthiest localities in the nation. With sprawling suburban housing in its eastern portion, giving way to a more rural and exurban community with wineries and breweries to its west, this county of just over 500 square miles counts many lobbyists, politicians, political activists, attorneys, government employees, and contractors among its population of over 420,000.

For many of its residents, Loudoun represents a region perfectly suited to family living: spacious homes in pristine white-picket-fence suburbs, a plethora of local businesses and amenities, and a well-funded and highly rated school district, all within reasonable commuting distance from major hubs of commerce and government.

But the path the school district in this highly affluent suburb took to the national spotlight began in the summer and fall of 2020, when a national battle over the reopening of schools to in-person instruction after pandemic closures was being waged at the local level.

Despite being among the most well-funded in the nation, Loudoun County Public Schools was one of thousands of school districts nationwide that failed to open full-time until after the calendar had flipped to 2021. In the meantime, a cohort of parents had organized out of anger at the district's failure to provide in-person instruction, and they were infuriated over increasing evidence of critical race theory in school curricula.

Groups such as Parents Against Critical Theory were established to oppose the district's leftward turn. And the political action committee Fight for Schools, led by Ian Prior, a seasoned political activist, began a yearslong effort to oust members of the school board for participating in a Facebook group called "Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County" that compiled a list of names of parents who had opposed the district's "equity" initiatives.

But while similar parent groups had sprung up in school districts all over the nation and faced similar opposition, a seminal moment for Loudoun County occurred on May 25, 2021. On that day, Tanner Cross, a gym teacher at Leesburg Elementary School, addressed the school board during its public comment period to oppose proposed policy 8040, which would allow students to use bathroom facilities corresponding to their stated gender identity.

Three days later, Cross was suspended from his job. But that same day, May 28, 2021, a male student, reportedly wearing a skirt, sexually assaulted a female student in the girl's bathroom of Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, Virginia.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group, sued on behalf of Cross, seeking a court order to have the gym teacher reinstated, which was later granted.

On June 22, 2021, the school board meeting descended into chaos as speaker after speaker called on the board to reject policy 8040. At that meeting, Ziegler, who was then superintendent, said that to his knowledge, there had been no sexual assaults in school bathrooms despite having previously been informed of the Stone Bridge incident a month prior.

The enduring image from that June meeting was Scott Smith, the father of the Stone Bridge High School sexual assault victim who was hauled away by law enforcement after a physical confrontation.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Prior, the executive director of Fight for Schools, said that Cross's suspension and the June 22, 2021, meeting ultimately proved to be a "dual catalyst" for Loudoun's place as the epicenter of the parental rights movement.

"Once that happened, they [the school board] weren't just dealing with a bunch of sort of unorganized parents that are coming together for the first time," Prior said. "They're dealing with ... a well-oiled machine that had come together over the past year."

While the board ultimately approved policy 8040 in August 2021, Smith's arrest at the June 2021 meeting was cited by the National School Boards Association in a September 2021 letter asking the Biden administration to invoke the Patriot Act and investigate parents protesting at school board meetings as domestic terrorists. The organization later retracted and apologized for the letter, which was reportedly solicited by senior Biden administration officials, but not before Attorney General Merrick Garland authorized the creation of a joint FBI/Justice Department task force to investigate threats against school board members.

The NSBA letter and the Garland memo provided a catalyst for conservative parent activists across the country to decry the Biden administration for what they said amounted to weaponizing federal law enforcement against parents concerned about the state of their local public schools.

Days after the Garland memo was released, the same student who had assaulted Smith's daughter in the bathroom of Stone Bridge High School, now transferred to Broad Run High School by order of the school district, assaulted another female student in an empty classroom.

As the details of the assault made national headlines, then-gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) and attorney general candidate Jason Miyares (R-VA) vowed to investigate the school district's conduct in response to both assaults if they were elected.

On Nov. 2, 2021, both Youngkin and Miyares defeated their Democratic opponents and were sworn into office in January. In April, Miyares, at the direction of Youngkin, impaneled the grand jury that ultimately indicted Ziegler, the former Loudoun superintendent, on three misdemeanor charges and also indicted LCPS Public Information Officer Wayde Byard on a felony perjury charge.

Recognized as an important figure in the parental rights movement due to his work in Loudoun, Prior says the board's desire to enact policy 8040 motivated the improper response to the assault at Stone Bridge High School, inadvertently providing the parental rights movement with a watershed moment and ultimately dooming the board's credibility.

"You have a teacher go and speak out against this policy that nobody was really tracking at that time, and he gets suspended, and not only it becomes a lawsuit in the span of a week, three days later, you have the situation at Stone Bridge," Prior said. "[The school board] knew that this policy was going to be an issue. But with those two events happening, they knew it was going to be an explosive issue."

"The last thing that they needed was a second story about [policy] 8040 before trying to pass it," Prior added, referring to the assault in the Stone Bridge High School bathroom.

"As I look back on it now, even then, you could feel a sea change in our fight, where the coalition got so much bigger and it was no longer about an enemies list or critical race theory," Prior said. "That's when it became about 'there is a rot in Loudoun County Public Schools.'"

Prior and Smith were among dozens of parents who returned to the school board's meeting chambers Tuesday in the wake of Ziegler's firing and criminal indictment to demand the members of the board who were active at the time of the assaults to resign and clean house.

"You've already failed this week," Smith told the board at the meeting Tuesday. "The principals are still at both schools. That's your job that should have been handled within minutes of you taking [Scott] Ziegler's job. Why isn't it done? Why are those principals still there?"