Parents urge Loudoun County school board members to resign
Virginia students walk out in protest of a recent sexual assault case. Parents Cheryl Onderchain and Dimis Christophy discuss the call for a leadership change.
EXCLUSIVE - The conservative America First Legal (AFL), through its Center for Legal Equality, has filed a lawsuit against Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) "for the district’s systemic and egregious moral corruption of children and its deliberate, and almost gleeful, violations of parental rights to control the upbringing of their children."
"Parents across the country should be shocked and horrified to see a once-respected school system systematically destroyed, all because LCPS believes that it has more of a right than parents to tell a captive audience of students what they MUST believe," America First Legal said in a press release Tuesday. "Fortunately, as we have seen, there are no parents with more courage, more fight, and more rock-solid dedication to their children than in Loudoun County, Virginia."
Some of the policies targeted in the America First Legal lawsuit, which the group noted was "on behalf of eleven courageous parents," include Policy 8040 and Regulation 8040, which, the group said, "compels student speech, forces young children to use bathrooms and locker rooms with members of the opposite sex, and keeps parents in the dark when their children lead a double life as a different gender during school hours."
Parents and community members attend a Loudoun County School Board meeting, just 40 minutes from Fairfax. (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein)
The lawsuit also hits LCPS for "Filling classroom libraries with books that encourage children to question their gender as early as Kindergarten; Forcing students to publicly provide their ‘pronouns’ in front of class; Making it virtually impossible for parents to remove the pornographic books available to children in LCPS libraries; Refusing student’s requests to go to the water fountain and bathroom as a form of retaliation for not wearing a mask, Hiding information from parents by charging exorbitant fees or claiming legally deficient exemptions to Freedom of Information Act requests;" and more.
"I think that Loudoun County Public School has really been the poster child across the country for… epic mismanagement and violation of parental rights and commitment to… really what has become almost a state sponsored religion of wokeism," America First Legal Senior Advisor Ian Prior told Fox News Digital.
The plaintiffs listed several demands from the school district.
"A declaration from the court that Policy and Regulation 8040, and other policies and practices violate plaintiff parents’ constitutional rights; an injunction against LCPS to prevent it from continuing to do so; the appointment of a special master to monitor LCPS and report to the court on its compliance with its legal obligations; an order directing LCPS to pay for plaintiffs’ children’s education in a private school until LCPS ceases its unlawful activities," AFL wrote.
The Loudoun County School Board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Loudoun County has been the scene of parental unrest on several accounts in the past couple of years, including how the school district handled a pair of sexual assault allegations.
Loudoun County High School (Google Maps)
Reports revealed that in October of last year school officials transferred a Loudoun County teenager from one high school in the district to another following an accusation of sexual assault against a female student. He was then accused of assaulting another girl at the second school. A judge found the teenager guilty, sentenced him to supervised probation in a residential treatment facility and ordered him to register as a sex offender.
"One of the key functions of the school division, in addition to providing a quality education, is to keep students safe," Prior said. "And what you're seeing over the past several years in Loudoun County Public Schools is that they are far more focused on these woke ideologies and forcing students to believe something that they don't want to believe than actually keeping students safe."
YOUNGKIN PUTS ALL LOUDOUN COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS IN HOT SEAT IN MID-TERMS
The controversy, in addition to parents' concerns over critical race theory, sexualized classroom lessons, COVID-19 masking measures and more were among the reasons Virginia parents confronted their local school boards and voted for Republican Glenn Youngkin in the November 2021 gubernatorial election. On Youngkin’s first day in office, he authorized Virginia’s attorney general to investigate possible wrongdoing by Loudoun County School Board members regarding the sexual assaults.
"America First Legal, as part of our Center for Legal Equality, has uncovered a scandal in Loudoun County VA Public Schools that will chill parents to the marrow of their bones," America First Legal President Stephen Miller said in a statement Tuesday to accompany the lawsuit. "The extreme social gender experiments being forced onto small children are nothing short of government-directed child abuse and child sexual exploitation. The earth-shaking accusations contained within this lawsuit include forcing little children — against their will — to share bathrooms with the opposite sex, to undress against their will in front of the opposite sex, to secretly transition children without parental notification (thus placing them on the road to irreversible chemical sterilization), to introduce and make available sexually explicit materials for minor children, and to try to force the silence of parents by attaching outrageous and exorbitant financial demands to requests for basic information."
Opponents of an academic doctrine known as Critical Race Theory attend a packed Loudoun County School board meeting until the meeting erupted into chaos and two people were detained, in Ashburn, Virginia, U.S. June 22, 2021. (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein)
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"It only makes sense that those parents would do everything in their power to return the school system to the kind of division that it used to be, which was focused on math and science writing and reading and history, and not focused on forcing beliefs on children contrary to what the parents are trying to do, which is their constitutional right," Prior added of the plaintiff parents.