The Loudoun County School Board voted unanimously to fire schools superintendent Scott Ziegler on Tuesday night, following the release of a damning grand jury investigation into the school division’s handling of a pair of sexual assaults.

Ziegler was terminated without cause, meaning the school system will continue providing him with his $323,000 salary — including a recent raise — and additional benefits for a full year.

The grand jury’s report, released on Monday, details the school system’s mishandling of two sexual assaults perpetrated by the same student at two different high schools. After the first assault, in May 2021 at Stone Bridge High School, LCPS officials transferred the student to Broad Run High School, where he assaulted another student in October 2021. The report found massive communications breakdowns within LCPS throughout the handling of the incidents — some of which led to key school staff being unaware of or inattentive to the student’s patterns of behavior as reported by other students and lower-level staff. The report cites “a stunning lack of openness, transparency and accountability” on the part of administrators.

The grand jury report is particularly critical of Ziegler, who has been superintendent since June 2021, for failing to keep the public — and sometimes even the school board — informed about the schools’ response to the assaults. The report says Ziegler lied to the public at an explosive June 2021 school board meeting, when he testified that, to his knowledge, no sexual assaults had occurred in LCPS bathrooms — a meeting that happened weeks after LCPS administrators had responded to the first assault, which happened in a Stone Bridge High School bathroom.

Ziegler has said he didn’t understand the question, which was in the context of a discussion about Policy 8040, a state-mandated policy allowing transgender and nonbinary students to use the bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity. Ziegler said he thought the question was in reference to assaults in school bathrooms where transgender or nonbinary students were involved.

That policy — which was the subject of extensive political outrage and debate — was not then in place, but one Stone Bridge administrator told Ziegler and others that the assault was “related” to the policy, seemingly driven by rumors that the assailant was wearing a skirt at the time of the attack. Conservative media have claimed that the perpetrator was “gender fluid,” and used the episode to criticize the school division’s policy. There is no evidence that the assailant gained access to the girl’s bathroom because of what he was wearing at the time.

The report further criticizes Ziegler for stonewalling school board members seeking more information, often claiming that he couldn’t provide more details due to ongoing law enforcement investigations.

Following the second assault, the report says that Ziegler again misled the public at an October press conference at which he claimed the schools had followed proper Title IX procedures and blamed predecessors for poor disciplinary incident reporting procedures.

In fact, LCPS didn’t open up a Title IX investigation into the May assault until October, after the second had already taken place, according to the grand jury’s findings. Ziegler’s chief of staff, who was then serving as the Title IX coordinator and has since been fired, refused to open a Title IX investigation over the summer, citing that the law enforcement investigation was still ongoing.

When one person in Loudoun school leadership took concerns about the delay in a Title IX investigation to Ziegler, the superintendent “‘alpha dogged [him] down,’” according to testimony quoted in the grand jury report. Ziegler previously served as the Title IX coordinator for the Loudoun school system.

The report concluded that LCPS as an institution tends to avoid managing difficult situations directly, something which led to a perception of “apathy.”

“The culture needs to change,” the report reads. “Stronger leadership would address problems head-on instead of allowing them to snowball.”

Across the political spectrum, community leaders and members said they approved of the school board’s decision to fire Ziegler, a rare moment of agreement in a county whose schools and school board have become a political football.

“Dr. Scott Ziegler needs to be fired,” said Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis Randall on Tuesday night during a public meeting. “We had a young woman violently raped and another one assaulted, and this was for all intents and purposes, on his part, a coverup.”

Board member Tiffany Polifko, who was elected to the Broad Run District seat in November and had called for Ziegler’s resignation on the campaign trail, said in a statement on Facebook that she looked forward to working with the board on “rebuilding trust” broken by the episode.

“Advocating for the most important stakeholders (children) begins with a demand for strong leadership that encompasses accountability and responsibility for ensuring the safety of children, working in their best interest, and fostering a relationship of trust between parents/caregivers and the school system,” she wrote in a statement on Facebook on Tuesday night.

Ian Prior, the executive director of Fight For Schools, hailed Ziegler’s firing as the beginning of accountability for the school division’s missteps.

“We are pleased Superintendent Ziegler will no longer be in the position to put children at risk due to his utterly reckless conduct,” Prior said in an emailed statement. “However, he was not the only bad actor identified in the special grand jury report and we will continue to demand the full leadership and culture changes that the special grand jury recommended.”

Fight For Schools is a conservative parents’ rights group that called for Ziegler’s firing in October 2021, and also led multiple unsuccessful recall efforts against several school board members.

Michael Rivera, a Loudoun parent who lost a bid for the Leesburg seat on the school board last month, said he hoped Ziegler’s firing is the beginning of “housecleaning” in the top ranks of LCPS. He said he wants to see others in school leadership who were “complicit” in the failures outlined in the grand jury report held accountable.

Rivera also said that the seven members of the school board who served on the board while the assaults took place should not run for reelection.

“Even if they didn’t know all the details of the assaults, they still all agreed to give him a raise amidst all of this that was going on,” Rivera pointed out. “They can’t walk away from this unscathed.”

Prior, with Fight For Schools, said he wanted to see the school board hold regular town meetings and oversight hearings, as well as a push for greater public transparency around contracts.

“I think that would go very far in reassuring the public that it is the school board that is running the show, not the superintendent,” he said.

Prior also indicated that Fight For Schools would be supporting challengers to all the school board members but Polifko when their seats are up for election next November.

Loudoun4All, a progressive advocacy organization, called Ziegler’s firing — and the firing of his chief of staff, the former Title IX coordinator — “important steps toward accountability from LCPS” in an emailed statement.

The group also called for the resignation of Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman, based on findings from the grand jury that the sheriff’s office did not take the first assault seriously until after public outcry spilled over at the June 2021 school board meeting. The report also suggests that Chapman and LCPS leadership have a rocky relationship that was damaging to the overall community response to the assaults.

Prior said he didn’t support resignations in the sheriff’s office, but agreed that there was “absolutely” room for law enforcement to examine communication problems and the early handling of the criminal investigation.

Rivera, who works for the sheriff but said he was not authorized to comment directly on the office’s policies, acknowledged that the report documents problems in communications between different agencies in the county and called those areas “opportunities for improvement on the policy side so that these things don’t happen systemically.”

Sexual assault and harassment — particularly in K-12 schools — is a notoriously under-reported crime, with victims who do come forward often disbelieved or re-traumatized. Fairfax County Public Schools have also come under legal scrutiny for bungled handling of sexual assault accusations, and experts say K-12 schools nationally often do not have effective policies or procedures in place to support victims or handle the accused.

There’s already evidence in Loudoun County Public Schools that students who have been victims of sexual violence and harassment do not feel supported or heard. Be Better Woodgrove, a group of students and alumni from Woodgrove High School, found 338 reports of sexual harassment or sexual assault in a 2020 survey of students and alumni of the school. Of the students who had reported an incident, 90% said they did not feel school administration took their experiences seriously, and only 12% said they felt comfortable talking with staff about what they’d experienced in the first place.

Loudoun4All, Prior, and Rivera all said they hoped there would be more done to examine school culture and policy failures in responding to the two sexual assaults detailed in the report and others more broadly.

“All too often a scapegoat is used in these situations to appease the public, instead of making systemic changes,” Loudoun4All said in the statement. The group has called for LCPS to make “a plan for greater transparency and specific protocols” for handling sexual assault, and to make reporting procedures and expectations for such incidents clear for students and staff. Loudoun4All also called for a focus on educating students about consent.

The grand jury report details several instances where it appears that either policies were not established to handle the aftermath of an assault, or they were not followed. The assailant returned to Stone Bridge High School the next school day after the attack, and school administrators scrambled to ensure that he would be separated from his victim, per the report. His transfer to Broad Run High School did not appear to receive particular scrutiny or communication from the principal or higher-level administrators, even after he harassed another student early in the school year. Several teachers’ reports about the student’s behavior did not appear to have been taken seriously.

Prior said he’d support better education about “what constitutes sexual assault” and added — echoing a recommendation from the grand jury report — that LCPS should also evaluate what apps and messaging platforms students have access to on their school system-issued Chromebooks. He also said the schools should examine their approach to bathroom security.

Rivera agreed with calls to scrutinize the process for reporting and responding to reports of sexual assault, noting that the process is “very stressful” for victims.

“It’s kind of like, believe women, the MeToo movement and all of these things. We have to take these things more seriously,” he said. “There’s a lot more sexual activity in schools than people want to admit. So we need to put mechanisms in place to help protect children.”

This story has been updated to include comments from Ian Prior.