A judge ordered the release of a report from a special grand jury investigating the institutional failures around the response to two high-profile sexual assaults Loudoun County high schools last year.

The assaults, one at Stone Bridge High School in May 2021 and one at Broad Run High School in October 2021, were perpetrated by the same student, who was transferred to Broad Run High School following the first offense.

The student was found responsible in the first case in October, and pled no contest to the second in November, according to The Washington Post.

The grand jury report finds that the second assault “could have, and should have, been prevented,” but wasn’t because of failures by school officials, as well as widespread collapse in communication between Loudoun County school officials, the sheriff’s office investigating the assaults, local court services, and the county’s commonwealth’s attorney’s office.

According to the report, there was also little communication between school administrators and the school board. The review did not find evidence to support allegations of a “coordinated cover-up” between school officials and board members, who “were deliberately deprived of information regarding these incidents” until after the second assault had already happened.

“We believe that throughout this ordeal LCPS administrators were looking out for their own interests instead of the best interests of LCPS,” the report reads. “This invariably led to a stunning lack of openness, transparency and accountability both to the public and the special grand jury.”

The county schools — including school board members — threw up roadblocks throughout the grand jury investigation. The schools also chose not to release an independent review commissioned by the school board, citing attorney-client privilege.

The grand jury has not yet been discharged, according to the state attorney general’s office, meaning the investigation will continue. It’s unusual for a grand jury to share a report with its findings, but members wrote they felt the community would benefit from the information they collected.

A joint statement from School Board Chair Jeff Morse and Vice-Chair Ian Serotkin noted that the grand jury report found “no evidence of criminal conduct” by LCPS employees. But the revelations were still troubling, the statement said.

“This broad use of the special grand jury investigative process did, however, yield a Report that contains several criticisms of LCPS employees and processes within the Division that are quite serious,” Morse and Serotkin said in their statement.

Morse and Serotkin pledged to put the report up for discussion at the next school board meeting, with an eye to examining the report’s recommendations for how to avert similar failures in handling sexual assaults in schools in future. Those include that LCPS share information more widely and transparently with the public; establish formal procedures for transferring students that include better communication between LCPS administration, school leadership, faculty, and school resource officers; strengthen communication with criminal justice agencies; tighten policies about what apps students have access to on school computers; limit instances when school board members choose to invoke attorney-client privilege; and give staff more support in confronting difficult situations.

The document — which runs about 90 pages, including attached exhibits — uses witness testimony, emails, and other written messages from school officials to detail the events leading up to and following the May sexual assault at Stone Bridge High School and the October assault at Broad Run High School.

Community outrage, political fuel

News of the assaults and subsequent lack of transparency from school administrators sparked community outrage and quickly became major national political news in the closing weeks of the Virginia gubernatorial election. Conservative media repeatedly linked the fact that the student was wearing a skirt at the time of one of the assaults, which took place in a girls’ bathroom, to Loudoun County Public Schools’ new policy (not yet implemented) that would allow transgender and nonbinary students to use bathrooms reflecting their gender identity. Fox News alone aired 88 segments between October and mid-November, according to watchdog Media Matters.

One of newly-elected Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s first executive actions in office was to direct the attorney general’s office to investigate the circumstances surrounding the assaults. Attorney General Jason Miyares impaneled a special grand jury to conduct that investigation — the results of which are broken down for the public in the new report.

“The School Board failed to demand accountability or conduct proper oversight of the superintendent & staff,” Miyares tweeted in sharing the release of the report. “I look forward to positive change in LCPS from this report.”

The report largely absolves the school board of playing any major role in the school division’s failed response to the assaults, noting that while board members asked for more information at several key junctures, they often still learned about developments from media reports, not LCPS leadership.

Morse and Serotkin, the school board leaders, said the report’s findings push back on Miyares’ previous accusations that school officials “covered up a sexual assault on school grounds for political gain.”

“To the best of our knowledge, this allegation was not true, and, after conducting an eight-month investigative process, during which it had the ability to interview any LCPS employee, Board member, and any other individuals beyond the LCPS community it deemed relevant, and during which it had access to virtually any LCPS record that was not otherwise legally privileged, the Special Grand Jury neither cited any evidence to support this serious allegation nor made any such conclusion in its Report,” Morse and Serotkin said.

Loudoun Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj said the information shared among stakeholders during the investigations had been “untimely and sparse.” Biberaj invited the schools and other criminal justice agencies to come together in response to the report.

“The lesson that we should take away is that we can’t continue to operate in silos when the safety of our children, or anyone in the community, is at stake,” she said in a statement.

The first assault

Even before the first assault, a teaching assistant was concerned enough about the student’s behavior to send an email warning school administrators at Stone Bridge that it might escalate, but nothing came of the warning. The assault took place just a few weeks later, when the student forced another student to have anal sex in a school bathroom, continuing the assault even after a teaching aide came into the bathroom and noticed two feet in one stall. The perpetrator was only located and taken into custody by sheriff’s deputies hours later, at the end of the school day.

In the wake of the May assault, according to the grand jury report, school leadership appeared to be more concerned with a disruption caused by the victim’s distraught father trying to enter the school. An email to the school community that evening noted the disruption and law enforcement presence, but released no information to the school community indicating that there had been an assault on school grounds.

“LCPS officials repeatedly cited privacy concerns or jeopardizing the LCSO investigation as the reason why the sexual assault was not mentioned in the email,” the report notes. “However, for a school system that repeatedly trumpets the importance of student safety, LCPS dropped the ball in alerting the community about this incident.”

The report suggests that the general lack of transparency on the part of school administrators could be related to sensitivity around then-proposed Policy 8040, which allows transgender and nonbinary students to use the restrooms that correspond to their gender identity and was then under consideration by the school board as required by Virginia law. (It was approved by the school board in August 2021.) The policy itself was not yet implemented in LCPS at the time, and witnesses in court have since testified that the student had previously met the victim in girls’ bathrooms for consensual sex.

However, it appears there was some confusion early on. Following the assault, LCPS’ chief operating officer, who was on scene, emailed LCPS leadership, including Superintendent Scott Ziegler, with the message that the incident was “related to policy 8040.” Shortly afterward, a group of administrators held a conference call on Microsoft Teams to discuss the situation.

Most of the school officials later told the grand jury they couldn’t recall what was discussed in the 30 minute call, “which we view as critical to a fuller understanding of why LCPS officials acted in the manner they did in the ensuing months,” the report says. “We believe there was intentional institutional amnesia regarding this meeting.”

The institutional failures at Stone Bridge extended beyond a lack of transparency. The sheriff’s office did not immediately arrest or charge the perpetrator, leaving school staff to figure out what to do with a student under investigation but not charged with serious criminal acts. The following week, the perpetrator of the assault returned to school, in the absence of any “formal policy for how to handle the situation,” the investigators wrote. School officials instead cobbled together a way to separate the student from the victim.

Delays in charging assailant

Later the following month, the incident exploded publicly following a wildly contentious school board meeting, which included a discussion of Policy 8040. The meeting went viral nationally as an early display of chaotic community outrage directed at school boards. During the meeting, the father of the victim of the Stone Bridge sexual assault victim was arrested.

The special grand jury report notes that many of the characterizations of what happened at the June meeting are “factually incorrect,” and the narrative attempts to set the record straight on a few key points. The father was arrested after a “personal altercation” with another attendee, not as a result of anything specific to the meeting itself, though the father told the grand jury he’d resisted arrest in part to draw attention to the school’s handling of the assault. (The family has since filed a lawsuit against LCPS.)

In the report, the June school board meeting is significant because it prompted school board members — who had received very few details about the Stone Bridge assault episode — to ask Ziegler if LCPS routinely saw sexual assaults occur in restrooms, to which Ziegler answered that he was not aware of any. The report agrees with one witness’s testimony, which characterized Ziegler’s statement as “a bald-faced lie.” Ziegler has since claimed he believed the question was specifically asking about assaults in bathrooms related to transgender or nonbinary students.

Following the meeting and the subsequent media reports, several school board members asked for updates about the assault investigation at Stone Bridge, but Ziegler told them he couldn’t provide updates since the matter was under review by law enforcement.

The June school board meeting also prompted the sheriff’s office to arrest the perpetrator of the assault, nearly a month after the crime occurred.

“We heard testimony that the LCSO ‘did not see fit’ to charge or arrest the assailant in the wake of the May 28 assault, but that calculus changed after the June 22, 2021 school board meeting where the father of the victim was arrested, the sexual assault became highly publicized, and Loudoun County was put in the national spotlight,” the report recounts, noting that some witnesses said sheriff’s office staff had originally described it as an “iffy case.”

The student was finally charged and taken into custody in July. But there was a breakdown in communication between the court services office, which is responsible for notifying the schools if an enrolled student has been charged with a crime. The office sent the notification — but via inter-office envelope to a Loudoun County schools employee who hadn’t worked in the superintendent’s office for seven years.

In a statement, the Loudoun County Sherriff’s Office said it had “thoroughly investigated both sexual assaults” and “worked tirelessly to ensure that victims were heard.” The statement did not reference communication problems with other agencies or the schools, instead only saying the sheriff would “continue to partner” with other stakeholders in such investigations.

That botched communication between the schools, the sheriff’s office, and court services, the report found, was a contributing factor in a months-long delay in opening up a Title IX investigation into the first assault.

In fact, that investigation didn’t start until October 19 — weeks after the second assault and months after the first. One member of LCPS administration was concerned by the delay and tried to get the school’s then-Title IX coordinator to change course, but was repeatedly told by school leadership that the criminal investigation had to conclude before they opened a Title IX inquiry. (The Title IX coordinator, who also served as Ziegler’s chief of staff, was later fired, likely in connection with that decision, according to the grand jury report.)

Even after the Title IX investigation was underway, the grand jury report indicates that the sheriff’s office did not provide LCPS with information about the original assault.

“Several witnesses testified the sheriff and the superintendent are not on speaking terms and tension exists between the leadership of LCPS and LCSO,” the grand jury found. “The citizens of Loudoun County deserve better than two high-profile individuals publicly squabbling and refusing to put aside any petty differences.”

A second assault

Similar breakdowns in communication and problems with siloed administrative structures were on display in the decision to transfer the student to Broad Run High School for the 2021-2022 school year. (Over the summer, the student was charged, but ultimately released from custody while the commonwealth’s attorney’s office continued to build a case. He had a probation officer, an ankle monitor, and a court order that prevented him from returning to Stone Bridge).

Communication between the court services office, which needed to alert Loudoun County schools to the fact that the student was facing charges and would not be allowed to return to Stone Bridge by court order, was again sluggish. It took until the first day of school for the appropriate LCPS administrator to be made aware of the court order and the need to transfer the student to a different school while the case moved forward.

Once the student started at Broad Run High School, the school principal had several discussions with the student’s probation officer, but did not review the student’s lengthy disciplinary file, according to the grand jury report.

Meanwhile, the student’s pattern of behavior was already becoming apparent — but largely falling on deaf ears among school and division leadership. His art teacher reported concerns to the Broad Run principal from two female students who said the student had been following them around the school. In early September, the assistant principal at the school learned that the transfer student had made inappropriate sexual comments to a fellow student and grabbed her. But when the assistant principal reported the incident to the LCPS Title IX coordinator, Ziegler’s chief of staff, nothing was done.

“Not a single person with knowledge of the student’s history or of this current action stepped in to do anything,” the grand jury report summarizes. “Instead, discipline was left to the BRHS principal, who did nothing more than issue him a verbal reprimand.”

The following month, the student grabbed a female classmate by the neck and dragged her into an empty classroom, where he assaulted her while choking her. The girl reported the assault to the school resource officer, and the student was arrested and detained immediately.

The aftermath

Once again, the aftermath of the second assault shows significant problems in communication. LCPS officials notified the school board of the Broad Run assault, but failed to mention the context from his previous school. School board members learned of the connection when The Daily Wire published a story with the news.

School board members have generally borne the brunt of public outcry over the handling of the assaults, with numerous calls for resignations and other personal accusations surfacing during public comment periods. While the community frustration is understandable, the report says, it’s been misplaced. “We have seen no evidence the school board, as a body or by any of its individual members, knew anything about any of these events” beyond a cursory notification about the first assault from Ziegler.

But the school board as well as school leadership and employees — many represented by the same attorney — played a role in creating legal “roadblocks to obstruct our investigation,” as the report puts it. The report describes a raft of court motions to prevent the grand jury’s subpoenas, an attempt to bring an injunction against the grand jury’s work by the school board, and “obstructionist” attitudes from the schools’ attorney during witness testimony.

“No Virginia statute explicitly addresses witness tampering, and the Virginia obstruction of justice statute does not cover this fact pattern,” the grand jury wrote of the LCPS counsel’s behavior. “For those reasons, we were unable to consider an indictment against the LCPS division counsel.”

In the wake of the assaults — and following the unreleased independent review of both incidents — LCPS has taken some “positive steps” to increase its Title IX resources and update its disciplinary policies, the grand jury investigators point out.

But the report’s final sentences call into question how far policy change will go.

“Throughout this investigation we have learned LCPS as an organization tends to avoid managing difficult situations by not addressing them fully,” the report says. “This has not served them or our community well, and the culture needs to change. Stronger leadership would address problems head-on instead of allowing them to snowball.”

Some parents — and the recently-elected Broad Run District school board member — have been calling for the resignations of Ziegler, members of the school board, and other leadership staff.

Those calls continued following the release of the report.

The family of one of the victims put out a statement that said the school board should “clean house” in the LCPS administration and then resign as a body.

“Hey @LCPSOfficial, have you fired Scott Ziegler and his senior staff yet?” tweeted Ian Prior, the leader of Fight For Schools, the conservative school advocacy group behind failed recall attempts of school board members. The group requested that Ziegler be removed by the Virginia Department of Education in February, and renewed the same call in response to the grand jury report.

Michael Rivera, a sheriff’s deputy and parent who lost a bid for the Leesburg seat on the school board last month, called on parents to show up at the next school board meeting to demand Ziegler’s firing.

Other community groups focused their concerns on the school district’s public transparency failures and the need to have policies to guide staff in dealing with sexual assaults in schools.

In a statement, progressive advocacy group Loudoun4All pointed to Be Better Woodgrove, a survey conducted by students and alumni at Woodgrove High School in 2020 that found that 90% of students who sought help from the school after sexual violence did not feel the school adequately responded to their experience, and only 12% felt comfortable reporting to school staff.

“On all levels of the school system, starting with the kids themselves, people need to know how to report an assault, who they should be reporting it to and what’s going to happen when they do,” said Amanda Bean, a parent and board member of Loudoun4All. “And they need to know that they’re going to be listened to and they’re going to be supported.”

Bean said the grand jury report left her with questions about whether LCPS had specific policies in place to handle educating students accused of serious crimes and didn’t follow them, or if the policies didn’t exist in the first place.

“We did hear over and over again in the report people confused about what the process was or what the responsibilities of different parties were,” she pointed out. “That needs to be outlined crystal clear, and then it needs to be communicated.”

This story has been updated with statements from the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and parents of one of the assault victims.