ASHBURN, Virginia — Fight for Schools executive director Ian Prior told Breitbart News the apparent sexual assault cover-up attempt in Loudoun County schools was implemented in order to protect a policy that allowed male students to use female restrooms.
After confronting the Loudoun County School Board for the first time since the release of a damning grand jury investigation and the unsealing of four indictments, Prior said that policy — Policy 8040 — was “100% the impetus for everything that we saw.”
When a male student wearing a skirt raped a female student in the girls’ restroom in May of 2021, the Loudoun school board was considering a policy on the treatment of “transgender” students that would allow them to use the restrooms and locker rooms of their opposite sex.
That male student would go on to violently sexually assault another student at a different school, and minimal disciplinary action was taken by the school district.
“They covered it up because they knew it would kill their policy,” Prior, a Loudoun County resident and Senior Advisor at America First Legal, said. “They put politics, they put their agenda over school safety.”
While the school district already allowed boys to use girls’ restrooms in practice, it was not yet formalized into a policy. The practice already in place is what made it possible for the rapist to commit his crimes, and Prior told Breitbart News that the school board “knew that bathroom security was a focus.”
“They knew that this was a problem, and that if there was another domino that it would kill this policy before it ever got passed,” he said. “There was a school board meeting two weeks before the incident that got shut down. And let’s not forget that Tanner Cross, just a few days before this incident happened, was suspended for speaking out against this policy, and it became national news.”
Scott Smith, father of the first victim, also spoke to Breitbart News saying that the board protecting the “transgender” narrative was more important to them than the safety of his daughter.
Loudoun County officials chose to make Smith the face of the problem, sending a letter the day of his daughter’s assault saying there was an incident with him trying to enter the school to find his daughter, but saying nothing of the rape that had occurred.
“It was obvious from the time they sent out the letter to the parents a day I showed up at the school, they didn’t want it out,” he said. “They didn’t want anybody to know about it. You know, the kid was wearing a skirt. It went directly against the narrative of what they were trying to push.”
Smith was also infamously arrested and removed from a school board meeting where he spoke out about what happened to his daughter, only to be told by then-superintendent Scott Ziegler — now fired and indicted on three misdemeanor charges — that no such rape occurred.
“They villainized me, they didn’t give services to my daughter and my family, and now they’re still trying to run our schools,” Smith continued. “They can’t be trusted to run our schools.”
The grand jury report shines a light on the “reckless indifference” the administration had in handling these issues, Prior said. “I’m certain that it is not limited to these these two incidents.”
While Prior said it “indicates a rot within Loudoun County Public School leadership,” the vindicated Smith said he “felt it could have gone deeper,” but maintained that it is just the beginning of the grand jury’s findings, as indicated by the report.
“We’re very thankful for all the work that they put into it,” Smith continued.
Prior told Breitbart News that he does not believe anything the school board does can change the lack of trust the people of Loudoun County have in their school board except mass resignations.
“I don’t believe that anything can be done,” he said. “I don’t care what policies they change, I don’t care what regulations they change. As long as the seven people, and that includes the Republicans on this board, are sitting here, no one is going to have faith in this public school system.”
“This board has completely failed in his duty to exercise any oversight,” Prior continued. “They should be ashamed of their performance, really since they were elected” as they were “demonizing parents, the very parents who were exposing this.”
Prior pointed out that one member of the school board, Atoosa Reaser, is currently campaigning for a seat in the Virginia General Assembly.
“She wants a promotion after overseeing the most notorious school district in America right now,” he said. “The arrogance of these people is something to behold. If they had any pride, if they had any conscience about their failures, they would step down.”
Prior called for the entire board, with the exceptions of newly elected, pro-parent member Tiffany Polifko and newly elected Erika Ogedegbe, to resign and “let the court step in and appoint interim members of the school board to serve out this term.”
He used the felony indictment of former district communications director Wayde Byard as a metaphor for the entire county.
“The fact that they indicted the spokesperson for Loudoun County Public Schools for perjury I think tells you everything you need to know about Loudoun County Public Schools: they lie,” he said. “Everything that we have highlighted, they’ve lied about. I don’t know how you can trust anything that comes out of the school system.”
Loudoun County schools still appear eager to protect their own.
Indeed, even though the grand jury report pinpoints division counsel Robert Falconi as someone they would have indicted but lacked the relevant witness tampering statute in Virginia in order to do so, Falconi is not only still employed, but was reading off new policy proposals in response to the grand jury report at Tuesday night’s school board meeting.
Many parents at the meeting called for the firing of Falconi.
Moreover, even in their firing of Ziegler, the school board decided to do so “without cause,” meaning he still gets to keep his $325,000 salary and other benefits throughout the next year.
Prior suggested to Breitbart News that this cushy severance deal was made by the school board as something of a payoff so that Ziegler does not “come out and say some things that didn’t come out in front of the grand jury.”
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.