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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.

And, once the grand jury investigation had begun, the legal office's emphasis on obfuscation was not limited to its 'independent' review:

On April 22, the same attorney filed another motion to quash testimonial subpoenas on behalf of three teachers at SBHS using, again, the same arguments. The court again rejected these arguments.

In this instance, however, one of the teachers was explicitly not represented by the attorney, even though he claimed to the court in a filing that he did represent her and was advocating on her behalf. The teacher said she felt pressured by the attorney into representing her, that the attorney told her not to provide the special grand jury with anything, and that the attorney tried to "shut [her] up" because "this won't look well for the schools."...

On the date of their testimony, the two school board members did not show up. The court gave them two hours to arrive at the courthouse otherwise the court would issue a capias warrant for their arrest. The board members subsequently arrived at the courthouse in a timely manner. One of the board members testified "it was based on my counsel's advice not to show up. Otherwise, I would have been here."...

Division counsel's mere silent presence in a crowded room was enough for LCSB's lawyer to claim the attorney-client privilege and instruct the witnesses not to answer the question... LCSB's counsel also inappropriately used hand signals and other methods to communicate with witnesses while they were testifying...

We received the May 28, 2021 email from the LCPS chief operating officer regarding policy 8040 and the SBHS incident in early September, even though it should have been produced months earlier in response to the April 7 subpoena to the superintendent. Instead, this email was produced pursuant to a document subpoena to a different LCPS administrator, who had their own lawyer, and not the preferred lawyer of LCPS division counsel...

Several school board members then testified to the exact same story: the chief operating officer said the incident at SBHS had to do with policy 8040 because the father of the victim who showed up at the school that day was shouting about policy 8040.

There is absolutely no evidence the father said anything about policy 8040 that day, or that he even knew what policy 8040 was on that day. No school board member could provide any evidence that what they claimed happened had in fact happened -- even though they all parroted the same story. Interestingly, multiple school board members also corrected special counsel to the special grand jury when asked about the individual wearing a skirt in the female bathroom that day; these board members were quick to claim he was instead wearing a kilt.

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:

Unlike federal law, no Virginia statute explicitly addresses witness tampering, and the Virginia obstruction of justice statute does not cover htis fact pattern. For those reasons, we were unable to consider an indictment against the LCPS division counsel.

It gives, in the place of criminal charges, a list of administrative recommendations. Some range from the obvious to the tautological :

The LCPS directory of safety and security needs to be more involved in situations that threaten the safety and security of students, faculty, and staff.

While others are, bluntly, so broad and vague as to be unactionable:

Strengthen avenues of support and advocacy for faculty and staff confronted with challenging scenarios that could pose a danger and/or impede learning.

To the nearly unrelated:

The superintendent's recommendation for the non-renewal of a teacher's contract should be the subject of a separate agenda item and not placed on the LCSB consent agenda.

((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.

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.