Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) failed to report alleged sexual assaults in its district for years, The Daily Wire reported on Thursday.
Virginia law requires that districts log certain information documenting the presence of sexual assaults and other criminal activity at each school in the Virginia Department of Educations’ public database Safe Schools Information Resource (SSIR), but data suggests LCPS has repeatedly failed to report numerous sexual incidents including a recently publicized alleged rape.
Earlier this week, a Loudoun County father accused LCPS of covering up his daughter’s rape by a “gender-fluid” boy in a school bathroom. For months, Scott Smith, a small business owner in Virginia, became the “domestic terrorism” poster child for a leftist school board association after he was arrested on June 22 at a Loudoun County school board meeting for arguing with someone about the school board’s policy proposal to allow students to ignore their sex and use whichever locker room matches their “gender identity” on a given day.
Less than one month before the gathering that was eventually ruled an “unlawful assembly,” “a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.”
The school board, however, publicly denied at the June 22 meeting that there was ever any sexual assault from a transgender-identifying student and later voted to pass the controversial policy despite parental outrage.
“To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” Superintendent Scott Ziegler replied.
Parents in the district demanded Ziegler step down from his position this week following the expose of the district’s coverup of alleged crime. The Smith family also announced their intent to sue the school district over the incident and June 22 arrest.
While the local sheriff’s office confirmed a “Forcible Sodomy [and] Sexual Battery” report at the same time Smith said his daughter was assaulted at Stone Bridge High School, LCPS reported to the Virginia Department of Education that “Stone Bridge had zero sexual assaults for the 2020-2021 school year, which includes May 28, 2021.” The district also reported no sexual incidents in 2018 even though “three football players at Tuscorara High were arrested and charged with sexual assault.”
The Virginia Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle said his agency would look into LCPS’s failures to report and noted that SSIR’s “mandatory reporting is not contingent on the filing of charges by law enforcement or subsequent convictions.”
“[The Virginia Department of Education] is reviewing the discipline, crime and violence data submissions of Loudoun County Public Schools and is in communication with LCPS to determine whether the division’s reporting is accurate and whether the division is in compliance with state and federal law,” he told The Daily Wire.
