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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32327 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The Loudon County Special Grand Jury final report has been released. [previous discussion here]

For a summary of the background: Loudoun County School District had a possibly-gender-something student sexually assault a much-younger female student who the assailant had a previous relationship with at Stone Bridge High School (SBHS) on May 28th, 2021. While eventually arrested, state law limits pre-trial detention to 21-days for this class of juvenile, and the assailant was transfered to Broad Run High School (BRHS) for the next school year. The father of this first victim was expelled from the school on the day of the assault, and later arrested by the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office (LCSO) during a school board (LCSB) meeting where he confronted or was confronted by someone (not a part of the school board?). On October 6th, the assailant further abducted and sexually assaulted another female student at BRHS.

Get used to the acronyms; the report uses them everywhere.

The report is... a read. With apologies for transcription errors:

Later that evening, a school board member asked the superintendent "do we have assaults in our bathrooms or in our locker rooms, regularly? I would hope not but I'd like clarification." The superintendent responded, "to my knowledge we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms." The SBHS principle, who attended the Teams meeting with the superintendent the afternoon the SBHS sexual assault took place, testified the superintendent's statement "is not true." Another witness testified the superintendent's statement was a "bald-faced lie." We agree.

There's two separate failures, here, that I think are worth discussion and highlighting. One is the more overt culture war, and the grand jury report does make very clear that the culture war drove a lot of bad practice. It's a little hard to tell since the report uses roles rather than names for everything, but it seems like even the last fig leaf Superintendent Zeigler was using about the controversial school board meeting, that he assumed the questions were about policy 8040-related sexual assaults rather than sexual assaults in general, was not actually true either, as an half-hour before the email previously made available, it turns out that:

At 3:30PM the chief operating officer emailed the superintendent, the now-deputy superintendent, chief of staff, directory of communications, and assistant superintendent, [stating in part]:

The incident at SBHS is related to policy 8040.

With extreme charity, perhaps this refers to the father’s near arrest, and not the rape itself, but that doesn’t absolve much.

At the same time, there's another disturbing component that I think a lot of 'mainstream' conservative critiques are likely to overlook:

The special education teaching assistant later said she saw two pairs of feet under the stall, but she did nothing about it. She testified this was not an uncommon occurrence, because "somebody could have their period. They might need a tampon. Or somebody had a boyfriend they had a fight with." The assailant later acknowledge that "They usually don't do anything" regarding two pairs of feet in a stall. After the teaching assistant left, the assailant again forced penetration against the female student...

That is, a teaching assistant -- in Virginia, a mandatory reporter -- walked past a bathroom stall where a violent rape was in-progress and, once the teaching assistant left, continued. Further, that this was not an unusual mistake, but enough of a practice that it was recognized by the offender. It's quite possible that Superintendent Ziegler was making a bald-faced lie not in the sense that this particular sexual assault occurred in a bathroom, but that there is little effort or interest in preventing dubiously consensual sexual behavior in bathrooms between students at all.

And this continued more broadly. On the day of the assault, the report details how the school was more intent on expelling an angry father and seeking a no-trespass order against him (e-mail at 3:09), even suggesting that the father "should have been arrested", than tracking down the at-large rapist (who was only grabbed at the end of the school day). Even once arrested, the local police showed little interest in bringing the case.

And even once that was done, there was a complex game of blame- and paperwork-passing that seemed optimized to lose track of things, and not just for this specific case.

However, juvenile intake did not call the superintendent's office, email the superintendent's office, or send a copy of the notification through the mail. Instead, the process in place at the time was to send it via inter-office envelope that was picked up at the courthouse. Further, the envelope was addressed to "David Spage," who is an LCPS employee but has not worked in the superintendent's office since 2014...

During the calendar year 2021, there were 39 school notifications sent [in this method], but it is unknown how many of those the superintendent's office ever saw.

((SBHS seemed to think the student had transferred to SBHS from another high school, THS, over similar allegations. The grand jury report says that this probably is confused and didn't happen? Which is another level of wtf, maybe.))

This continued even as other warning signs kept scaling up.

In the ensuing weeks after the assailant was released from custody, the court services unit learned information from the assailant's family that cause them to "keep a tight eye on this kid."

This included, separately, the assailant's grandmother and mother both requesting additional assistance from schools and the probation officer, with the grandmother calling the assailant a "sociopath."

In early September, the assailant had separate incidents at the new school, first following female students around school long enough to result in an art class shuffling the assailant's seating around, and then a more serious incident in an English classroom where the assailant tried to take a female student's Chromebook, and asked the female student about online nudes (and another boy if the boy's grandmother had online nudes?). This was escalated, yet:

The most senior individuals in LCPS knew about this incident, and knew is was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. Multiple people in the LCSO were aware of this incident around the time it occurred and kenw it was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. The deputy commonwealth's attorney prosecuting the May 28, 2021 case knew of the incident, and the probation officer, who had been communicating with the student and his family nearly daily for over a month, knew of the incident.

Not a single person with knowledge of the student's history or of this current action stepped in to do anything. Instead, discipline was left to the BRHS principal, who did nothing more than issue him a verbal reprimand.

On October 6th, this escalated to a second sexual assault, this time with the assailant abducting a female student without a fig leaf of a pre-existing relationship.

In "late October", the school commissioned an independent review of the incidents at hand. However:

Many board members were surprised to learn the report was subject to the attorney-client privilege.... Several board members testified they were given only half an hour to read the independent review and ask questions about it. Despite having asked for the review in the first place, they were handed out numbered copies of it and required to return it upon leaving the room. On January 14, 2022, LCSB [County School Board] issued a public statement stating the report would not be released, listing the attorney-client privilege as the third, and least-important, reason for keeping it private. The statement [link] also noted several changes and updates to LCPS [County Public Schools] policies and procedures.

It's hard to summarize exactly how much of a shitshow this was, but :

The director of school administration disagreed with this assessment [that they could not proceed until police completed their investigation] and had conversations with the chief of staff about it in July and August 2021. The director, even those his office was not supposed to be doing Title IX, also created a Google document of possible Title IX violations reported from schools because he was "worried at the time that we were not reporting some things that could become Title IX."...

On September 17th, 2021, the director of school administration testified he emailed the superintendent, chief of staff, deputy superintendent, and chief of schools, about the situation. He testified the email laid out his extensive training, experts he had met with, and the fact the SBHS assault should have "immediately" and "automatically" triggered an investigation. It is unknown how the superintendent or these officials responded - LCPS refused to provide us this email -- but it was not until a month later, and after the BRHS sexual assault, that a Title IX investigation into the SBHS sexual assault was opend. The individual who ultimately conducted that investigation testified it was the first Title IX investigation she had ever done.

It does seem like the only consequences of this will be empowering awful Title IX regulations and the hiring of another dozen administrators to impose them. Talk about victory even in defeat.

It's by design. They control the entire pipeline from front to back. They set the bar for what credentials are required. They hand out those credentials. They control what gets taught to acquire those credentials. They interview the candidates for the positions. There are no counterfactuals where dissidents are allowed anywhere near attempting to mitigate the problem.

So how to break that ? Change legislation ?

Now, bear with me here, my public school experience was overall good. But if you're talking about preventing the abuse of children, I think you're going to run into the problem of Child Abduction Is Not Funny. As much ideological weirdness happens in schools, and as infuriating as these incidents are, they're infuriating because it's public officials that are supposed to be accountable being unaccountable. Like being killed by a seatbelt or airbag or police officer.

But, most child abuse happens at home. It's mostly the parents and close family doing it, and at school there's people who will notice bruises, and so long as the parent isn't too Intersectional, they will investigate. I'm just not a fan of widespread homeschooling; the more of it there is, the harder it becomes to audit, and I don't trust un-audited homeschooling

The natural state of children is to be with other children doing children stuff. It's unfortunate that school is the main place where other children are.

Uh, isn’t the vast majority of child abuse in the home stepdads or stepbrothers, a group that is very underrepresented in homeschooling?

It's a coup complete problem.

There is no breaking it. You need parallel institutions from the ground up. Parallel school, parallel training, parallel gatekeeping, which is the most important part. You can't just start a new school, and connect it to the pipeline of ideological enemies being churned out of the institutions you fled from. You need to actively keep them the fuck out.

Unfortunately, keeping them out is likely to be "discriminatory", so you are just fucked. If you even try you'll get sued into oblivion. We simply are not permitted to have institutions which serve our needs.

But you can't use legislative change to starve these institutions so they wither?

We tried. Youngkin specifically rolled back a lot of these policies. People are no longer allowed to use whatever bathroom they please and schools are no longer allowed to secretly transition people's children. This is something he is allowed to do with executive power.

The schools just said "We don't care, we do what we want." It's probably going to be tied up in court until they can get a (D) in the office who will make it all go away. Northern VA is chocked full of branch covidians who still drive alone in their cars wearing masks, and believe Republican's are literally murdering people, on purpose, with their pro family, pro liberty policies. Recently my district was gerrymandered to take a 95% Republican county, and attach just enough of Fairfax County to it so that it will reliably seat a far left Democrat. I've been effectively completely denied representation. There is zero overlap between the interest of the county I live in, and the county that got to choose my representative. I'm fucked.

Northern VA is chocked full of branch covidians

You know better. If you don't want people calling you a Rethuglican or a Magtard, you don't get to do this.

If the shoe fits...

Listen, if I were advocating for Republicans to rise up violently, Rethuglican wouldn't be a bad fit. If I were advocating that Trump was still a genius, and this was all part of his 43d chess, Magtard wouldn't be a bad fit. And if you commute 90 minutes to work, alone, in your car, with a mask on, branch covidian fits.

Am I on some fucking short list of people you feel compelled fucking annoy whenever they use slightly creative language? Do you know what the no-no words are ahead of time, or do you just see myself enjoying writing too much and decide to be a killjoy?

I didn't call a user here a branch covidian, I didn't make sweeping generalization. I described a specific set of behaviors and beliefs, and used an appropriate descriptor for it. If you don't drive 90 minutes to work alone wearing a mask, be not offended, be not inflamed.

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