I remember how it was -- JR
Friday, December 09, 2022
Loudoun School Board Fires Superintendent Who Lied About Bathroom Rape
A Virginia school board fired its superintendent Tuesday night, more than a year after The Daily Wire revealed that he lied about the rape of a female student in a girls restroom even as he pushed for a controversial transgender bathroom policy, and one day after a special grand jury corroborated its findings.
The Loudoun County school board voted unanimously to sack Scott Ziegler “without cause,” meaning that according to his contract, he will be paid a golden parachute worth some $350,000, according to Loudoun Now, which noted that the board had given Ziegler a $28,000 raise in July.
That’s despite a grand jury finding that, at a meeting a month after the rape in which board members debated a policy that would allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice, Ziegler dismissed safety concerns.
“To my knowledge we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” Ziegler said, although he was well aware that weeks earlier a skirt-wearing boy had been accused of raping a girl in a high school bathroom.
The principal of the high school where the attack occurred later testified that the superintendent’s statement was not true and another witness called it a “bald-faced lie,” according to the grand jury report.
The school system’s communications arm — which the grand jury revealed ordered staff to “TAKE NO ACTION” in response to The Daily Wire’s October 2021 inquiry informing it of its findings — similarly did not return a request for comment on the firing. The Daily Wire had also requested a copy of Ziegler’s employment contract and information on whether any action would be taken against Division Counsel Robert Falconi, who the grand jury also found at fault.
After the grand jury report was released Monday, a statement attributed to school board chair Jeff Morse and vice chair Ian Serotkin said they were “pleased” that the grand jury has not indicted anyone, even though the report painted a devastating picture and found that “throughout this ordeal LCPS administrators were looking out for their own interests instead of the best interests of LCPS.”
By Tuesday night at a meeting of the county’s other governing body, the Board of Supervisors, Democrats turned against their colleagues on the school board, with Supervisor Kristen Umstattd condemning school officials and board members for taking a “victory lap,” which she called “callous,” Loudoun Now reported.
“Let me say this as clearly as possible: Dr. Scott Ziegler needs to be fired,” Board of supervisors chair Phyllis Randall, a Democrat, said. “We had a young woman violently raped and another one assaulted, and this was for all intents and purposes, on his part, a coverup.”
Soon after, the school board, meeting separately, fired Ziegler.
On May 22, 2021, a male student wearing a skirt anally raped a ninth-grade girl in a girls bathroom at Stone Bridge High School, shortly before the school board was to vote on the transgender bathroom policy. The school did not disclose that incident publicly, nor a second sexual assault committed in a classroom by the same perpetrator on October 6. School board members only learned that the same person was behind both when The Daily Wire broke the story October 11, the report said. The second assault “could have, and should have, been prevented,” grand jurors found.
The special grand jury, which was convened pursuant to an order from Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, said it was “met with obfuscation, deflection, and obvious legal strategies designed to frustrate the special grand jury’s work,” and blamed Falconi.
“Unlike federal law, no Virginia statute explicitly addresses witness tampering, and the Virginia obstruction of justice statute does not cover this fact pattern. For those reasons, we were unable to consider an indictment against the LCPS division counsel,” the grand jury wrote.
Scott Smith, the father of the rape victim, told The Daily Wire that “Firing Ziegler is a good first step, though it should have been done in October of 2021. However, justice will be denied until everyone whose egregious and reckless conduct was detailed in that report is terminated as well. That includes the Deputy Superintendent, Division Counsel, school board members and the other unnamed actors whose actions put our child and everyone else’s child at risk.”
Of the grand jury report, he said “The grand jury report is thorough, however, it has no teeth holding anyone accountable by name at the moment.”
But he said that a criminal standard is not the only one that applies. “There’s gonna be civil lawsuits. We’ll be filing a Title IX lawsuit in Alexandria federal court,” he said.
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Rutgers Professor on White People: 'We Gotta Take These Muthaf**kers Out'
Twitchy struck oil with this gem from a Rutgers University professor whose name made me do a double take, at least. Her name is Crunk, and she’s not a fan of the white folk. In a YouTube segment with The Root, Professor Crunk said that the end of white people is coming and that “we gotta take these motherfuckas out.” As many noted on social media, imagine if the roles were reversed and a white professor said something along these lines.
The first vestiges of this nonsense were cataloged during the Bush presidency, with David Horowitz’s book The Professors, a quasi-rap sheet for the nation’s worst of the worst concerning liberal academia. It’s matured into a more lethal cancer, which is what happens when conservatives cede ground. The impetus to do so is understandable, given that left-wingers dominate this insular, woke world.
It’s hell on earth, but if there is one thing we should learn in recent election cycles, conservatives should contest everywhere, even if the odds are insurmountable. This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last, where some unhinged academic goes off the reservation and spouts racist tropes soaked in genocidal tendencies. Eventually, the Left will overreach, and an equilibrium will return on these issues, though that’s hardly a satisfying ending.
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Indiana School Compels Staff to Hide ‘Gender Support Plans’ From Parents
An email unearthed by parents at an Indiana high school has revealed a districtwide support plan for students undergoing gender transition and a policy to withhold and hide information from students’ parents.
An Aug. 16 email sent by a counselor at Pendleton Heights High School in Pendleton, Indiana, informed teachers that a student had changed genders, provided new pronouns, and said teachers should not inform the student’s parents because they were “not supportive of the decision.”
The school counselor’s email concluded by telling teachers that if the student wanted to talk, she was to be sent to one of two counselors.
It’s not yet clear what grades or ages in K-12 instruction are covered by the school district’s policy. This particular email from a high school counselor, however, infuriated local parents and teachers.
Jason Payne, a parent with a child in that school district, South Madison Community School Corporation, told The Daily Signal in a text: “If staff at South Madison are willing to lie to parents about this—what else are they willing to lie about? How can I be assured my kid is safe while he’s at Pendleton if they can’t be trusted to be honest with me?”
This is not a unique circumstance, either. Over the last two years, dozens of “Gender Support Plans” with guidelines not to contact parents have been sent to teachers across the South Madison school district headquartered in Pendleton, counselor Kathy McCord confirmed.
Amanda Keegan, a geography and psychology teacher at Pendleton Heights High School, says she resigned in part to protest this policy.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal, Keegan said, “When I had to look at that parent, and feel like I was lying to that parent … I was sick to my stomach. I can’t lie to parents. I can’t do that again.”
Keegan also said that neither she nor other teachers had ever seen an official Gender Support Plan, whether in blank or completed form, and that she had received emails from counselors only when they were asking her to hide information from parents.
Keegan expressed distress that the school district would ask her to step between a parent and child, recalling how sick she felt when speaking with a parent who had no idea her child was on a Gender Support Plan.
The counselor who sent the Aug. 16 email, Kathy McCord, agreed to go on the record with The Daily Signal to discuss both the email she was required to send to Keegan and the South Madison district’s policies on Gender Support Plans and their origin.
McCord said she and other counselors have access to such plans, but teachers, parents, and the public do not—which she strongly disagrees with. McCord insisted that she and a few other counselors despise this district policy, describing it as both dishonest and harmful.
McCord confirmed that the school district is using the same Gender Support Plan that The Daily Signal obtained in blank form from a source who asked to remain anonymous.
McCord told The Daily Signal that this Gender Support Plan, modeled on a document at Hamilton Southeastern Schools, a school district in Fishers, Indiana, has been the policy of the South Madison school district since fall of 2021.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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