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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:
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:
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:
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.
((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.
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:
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:
It's hard to summarize exactly how much of a shitshow this was, but :
And, once the grand jury investigation had begun, the legal office's emphasis on obfuscation was not limited to its 'independent' review:
It'd be convenient if all of this tail-covering was focused on Policy 8040, and no small amount of it was, yet even to the extent Policy 8040 and broader trans-related stuff comes up, the school and its officers seem more interested in avoiding any controversy or blame on any sphere and from any direction, despite their significant powers and significant responsibilities. There is little or no evidence of ability to handle a non-culture-war variant of the same types of assault, or other criminal behaviors, despite evidence that they could have been occurring (39 missed notifications in one year!).
Unfortunately, the Grand Jury report falters when it comes to a conclusion. Despite everything above:
It gives, in the place of criminal charges, a list of administrative recommendations. Some range from the obvious to the tautological :
While others are, bluntly, so broad and vague as to be unactionable:
To the nearly unrelated:
((Presumably a teacher mentioned fearing termination for testifying? Maybe?))
It's a little uncomfortable to realize that the team of people studying this problem for a full year don't seem to have noticed, or if noticed, do not seem to have found it worth a bullet point, an underlying problem where this entire environment seems more interested in the text of legal compliance and avoiding liability than in the safety of their students or clear liability to longer-lasting civil torts. Yet that seems to be the room temperature, here.
Sorry to take it in this direction, but I am still fairly convinced this was the motivation and rationale behind the majority of covid policy. It was the reason for the initial reaction, the subsequent overreaction, for mask mandates, for lockdowns, for rushed testing and for vaccine mandates. Saving lives was at best secondary to covering asses. Society is run by middle aged adolescents, their greatest concern is the same as any teenager - if they admit they fucked up they might get in trouble.
The consequences for a person running society to be known to have fucked up is generally much worse than getting grounded for a week.
That's certainly true, but that's why we historically gave the job of running society to people with the maturity to recognise and admit to their mistakes. To understand that running society comes with a lot of prestige and respect and power, but also dramatically more severe consequences for mistakes - and if you do fuck it up, the consequences to you - no matter how severe - are microscopic compared to the consequences to society. Or to put it another way, if you wouldn't prefer your downfall to society's you shouldn't be running society.
But I call them middle aged adolescents because the impression I get from speaking to them and seeing/reading them in interviews is that none of that even enters their thought processes. It doesn't have time to because like an irresponsible teen the calculus terminates at 'but what if I get in trouble!?' regardless of whether the consequences are some light mocking from strangers or an international incident. I used to think this was only something kids raised by narcissists did. I still sometimes think that.
Has any society ever been good at selecting for leaders who will fall on their sword if need be?
Japan, literally.
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