Update (2:55 pm, 10/15/2021): Loudoun County Public School Board Member Beth Barts announced her resignation from the school board on Facebook on October 15. She explained her resignation will be effective November 2. NBC News Channel 4 reporter Drew Wilder claimed that "Barts has been the subject of intense scrutiny and controversy and was in the midst of an attempted recall by multiple parent groups."
Original Story:
According to a Daily Wire report, Loudoun County Public Schools has broken the law by failing to disclose several incidents of sexual assault in its schools to the public school authorities and to the public.
This latest news comes hot on the heels of allegations that several sexual assaults happened in Loudoun County schools in 2021, one involving a male student in a skirt student raping a young female student in a school bathroom. The Daily Wire alleged that the Loudoun County school board covered up the assaults.
The latest development shows that, at the very least, Loudoun County Public Schools did not disclose enough information about various sexual assaults in recent years required by Virginia state law.
The outlet cited a Virginia law which states that “Reports shall be made to the division superintendent and to the principal or his designee on all incidents involving … sexual assault.”
This is inconsistent with LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler’s plea of ignorance of the alleged May 28, 2021 assault of a female student at the hands of a male student wearing a skirt In June, Ziegler told the public, “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
Loudoun County Sheriff’s office confirmed to Fox News earlier this week that there is a criminal case pending involving the trans student who committed the assault, though they couldn’t reveal more details because of pending court proceedings.
When Daily Wire asked LCPS officials whether anyone had “reported the May alleged sexual assaults in any statistics or made anyone aware of it,” LCPS Director of Communications Joan Sahlgren stated, “any information related to student information is confidential under state and federal laws regarding student privacy.”
RELATED: Parents Demand Loudoun County School Board Resign After Child Abuse Allegations Surface
In its reporting, Daily Wire clarified that “state law actually require statistics on assaults and other incidents in schools to be reported to the public, in the form of annually updated statistics.”
The Virginia Department of Education actually facilitates the public database where these stats are recorded, called the “Safe Schools Information Resource.”
According to the report, LCPS recorded that the school in which the trans student’s assault occurred, Stone Bridge High School, had “zero sexual assaults for the 2020-2021 school year.”
Of course that means that the May 28 assault was never recorded in the database. Again, that goes against the law that “requires statistics on assaults … be reported to the public,” and, if the superintendent’s lack of knowledge on the assault is to be believed, it breaks the law that assaults be reported to the “division superintendent.”
Even more damning, is that VA law requires that “the division superintendent shall annually report all such incidents to the Department of Education,” so the frequency of such incidents can be monitored and that data be given to the public as well. Clearly that didn’t happen.
What’s more is LCPS didn’t just fail to record this year’s sexual assaults in it's schools, it failed to record a widely-reported case of assault in 2018.
If the reports are true, LCPS has been breaking the law by covering up traumatic and disturbing child abuse for years.