Loudoun County Situation Is Probably Worse Than You Thought – Certainly Worse Than You Were Told. – Eduwonk
Over the past year and a half I wrote a few posts on Loudoun County and how the “narrative” about it was often at odds with the facts on the ground. From an October 2021 post:
A common response to those posts was the idea this Loudoun controversy was all partisan, it was transphobic, it was much ado about nothing. In fact, the local newspaper, The Washington Post, could barely be bothered to report on it in any depth until today. It was freelance journalist Matt Taibbi – far from a local – who did the most definitive deep dive.
This is the key takeaway from a grand jury report released today about Loudoun’s handling of two sexual assaults:
There really aren’t words for such a failure of institutional responsibility to young people. It reminds me a lot of Parkland although thankfully no one was killed.
The report also includes chapter and verse of the school division’s effort to thwart this investigation. Too much to pull quote here, but if you think this entire parents rights and transparency issue is BS that Glenn Youngkin cooked up, well just read it.
Education media, that assiduously managed to avoid this story, might ask themselves why? The role of journalists is to ferret out facts, not parrot political narratives. That it was the Daily Wire or Taibbi looking into this rather than, or at least in addition to, our sector’s ed media (and hometown paper The Post) is a blemish on the sector. Stuff like this is inexplicable, a kid was raped. A preventable assault happened.
The tell should have been that every time, multiple times, the courts had an opportunity to shut down this investigation they didn’t. The most sensational narratives – from the idea on the right that trans students were marauding in bathrooms to the idea on the left that this was all BS – should have been suspect. But it was clear something was going on and local officials were not being transparent.
Education advocates and leaders might ask why they, too, as with Parkland, lost their voice in the face of a politically complicated set of circumstances where, again, we are talking about fundamental issues of student safety.
Seems like that applies more broadly than just LCPS?