Loudoun County, Virginia has a very woke school board.
Among other things, they've inserted Critical Race Theory in their mandatory curriculum, and they have decreed that high school kids can use whatever bathroom "matches their gender identity", even if they haven't actually transitioned.
On May 28, a "gender fluid" 14-year-old boy in a skirt followed a girl into a school bathroom, and sexually assaulted her.
A report was made to police, and an investigation was started. However, the woke school board was afraid that this would make them look bad, so they attempted to cover it up. When the father of the girl showed up to a school board meeting on June 22, he was arrested when he attempted to speak about it, after school board members told everyone that the sexual assault didn't happen.
Superintendent Scott Ziegler said at the June 22 meeting, "The predator transgender student or person simply does not exist. We don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms."
Except it was a lie.
In reality, the boy did exist, and he did commit sexual assault. Even worse, Loudon County schools decided to give him another chance (because he's a victim, being gender-fluid and all), and quietly transferred him to a different high school in the district. Very shortly after that, he sexually assaulted another girl.
One of the loudest woke board members, Beth Barts, was eventually pressured by the community to resign, both over this matter and inflammatory Twitter messages aimed at parents who disagreed with her. She resigned, effective in a few weeks.
This is peak woke left. It's more important to get on board with current trendy liberal causes than to actually protect students from harm.
Anyway, this has much more than local implications. The situation has impacted the Virginia gubernatorial race, where Democrat Terry McAuliffe, running for governor again after previously having served in the mid-2010s, is on the hot seat regarding the concept of parental rights in education. There is currently a debate as to whether the will of parents should direct the educational experience of children, or if it should be completely left in the hands of educators. This debate has heated up because of matters such as Critical Race Theory and "transgender" boys in girls' spaces.
This mess in Loudoun County -- where the school board first ruled that any student should be allowed to use any bathroom for any reason, tried to cover up a subsequent sexual assault in a girl's bathroom, and then quietly moved the boy to a different school -- is giving a lot of fuel to the argument that woke school administrators really don't know best.
This in turn has put McAuliffe on the hot seat, as he has strongly stated that he feels educators and the school board should be completely steering the ship, and parents need to stand back.
If McAuliffe loses to a no-name opponent in what was supposed to be a slam-dunk victory in a blue state, there is expected to be some panic among moderate Democrats. They are likely to abandon support for anything considered far left or transformational in Biden's agenda going forward, if they feel their own political future will suffer.
The election will be on November 2. McAuliffe has a narrow lead in polls, but this latest situation in Loudoun County could shift enough votes to where he loses.
McAuliffe is still the favorite to pull it out, mainly because it's a blue state and his opponent is a nobody, but watch this one closely.
