“Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!” hundreds of mostly white parents jeered at the Loudoun County Public School board members. The crowd waved signs demanding that educators stop teaching racism, and that they should instruct students that there are only two genders.
It was the final meeting of the academic school year in June 2021, and these parents had convinced themselves that efforts to teach accurate U.S. history was secretly an attempt to foster anti-white sentiment in schools.
But during the public comment section, the crowd became unruly and the meeting was eventually shut down, much to the chagrin of the attendees. Two people were arrested for disorderly conduct and trespassing.
Now, every seat on the school board is up for election on Nov. 7, and the conservatives want to blow up the whole school board and start from scratch.
It takes approximately one hour to drive from downtown Washington, D.C. to Loudoun County, Virginia, depending on the Capital Beltway’s infamous traffic. The suburb is home to more than 400,000 people, a good portion of them affluent, as well as sprawling shopping centers, McMansions set upon meticulously kept green lawns, and well-regarded public schools.
For the people who live in the D.C. region, Loudoun is known as where wealthy people live, or where families move so their children can receive a top-notch education.
It’s also rapidly growing, thanks to an influx of immigrants. The county was heavily Republican until 2008, when Barack Obama won it — as has every Democratic presidential candidate since.
The changes that come along with population increases are evident while driving around the county; some locations are well-developed, while others are not. In Sterling, shopping malls with grocery stores and restaurants are packed close together, but in Ashburn, near the Loudoun County Public Schools headquarters, there is a dearth of street lamps, and I spotted a lone fox peering at the road while waiting for a moment to run across.
Despite the changes, Loudoun County still has a great reputation for world-class schools — unless you ask a conservative.
School board races are no longer quiet affairs that only pique the interest of the few, truly dedicated candidates. Since the mayhem of 2020, conservatives have instigated a yearslong backlash to pandemic policies and incremental steps forward in racial equality.
Some of the Loudon County candidates embody the ongoing backlash.
Amy Riccardi is running for the seat in Sterling. She’s received endorsements from the Loudoun County Republican Committee and the 1776 Project PAC, a political organization whose main focus is keeping critical race theory out of schools. “When we elect political activists to public office we see their failed policies in action. When we elect political activists to our school board, and they hire activists into the school administration, children are harmed,” she wrote in a September Facebook post.
She said that Sterling schools are at the bottom for reading and math and that the board had ignored more than 100 Title IX complaints, the federal clause that bans gender discrimination. Her post included dog whistles about transgender students and books, with Riccardi saying that in schools are materials that are “not even suitable for public TV or radio,” “multigender bathroom experiments coming” and “boys in girls sports, bathrooms, locker rooms.”
For the last two years, the county’s school board has been embroiled in controversy. First, there were the debates about the reopening of schools after the pandemic kept students out of the classroom. Then, there was debate about whether or not students and staff should wear masks once they were back in school buildings. From there, it spiraled into protests over books, LGBTQ+ policies and transgender students playing sports.
Loudoun is now nationally known. It made headlines on Fox News after contentious school board meetings, and the Daily Caller has written breathless reports about teacher training and mask mandates there. It’s a perfect symbol of the struggle between the right’s attempt to push the nation’s schools into a conservative fever dream and the left’s attempt to keep schools a safe place for all children, regardless of their political stances, race, gender or sexuality.
Is the Loudoun County school system truly the victim of a liberal agenda designed to shoehorn in progressive values against the wishes of increasingly frustrated parents? Or is it just another victim of the right’s attempt to turn every school board into a haven for white conservative families?
Since all nine seats, including an at-large one, are up for grabs, the school board race is unusually crowded. And though the races are technically nonpartisan, a candidate’s top issues earn them endorsements from local Republicans or Democrats, and from progressive groups versus conservative ones.
“Loudoun County used to be the place where people would come for the schools. They were the best in the nation,” John Smith, the chairman of the Loudoun County Republican Committee, told HuffPost. “But things have changed in the last four years. The board is moving away from what parents really want their kids to go to school for — reading, writing and arithmetic,” Smith said.
He claims that there are “cartoonized sexually explicit books” in classrooms and educators “teaching kids to judge by skin color.” It’s a common refrain among conservatives around the country when targeting books about LGBTQ+ themes or racial justice.
But there’s ample evidence that the real problem isn’t inappropriate books or unqualified teachers. In June 2023, LCPS released a report that showed an alarming increase of racial incidents in its school system. The report said that during the 2022-2023 school year, there were nearly 900 such incidents. The vast majority of them were usage of a derogatory slur for Black people.
Meredith Ray, one of the board members of Loudoun 4 All, a progressive organization which grew as a counter to several right-wing groups operating in the county, says that conservative people are spreading lies and half-truths about the school system.
COVID closures and masking drama allowed conservative groups to seize “an opportunity to push a right-wing agenda” in Loudoun County, Ray told HuffPost.
“They think teachers are pushing liberal agendas in school, there’s the made-up critical race theory stuff and they’re fearmongering about books,” she said.
“At this point, people are overall tired of the narrative that schools are trying to indoctrinate children,” Ray added. “The majority of people with kids in Loudoun County know their children are receiving a high-quality education.”
Arben Istrefi, who is in the tech education field and has a child not quite old enough to attend Loudoun schools, is running against Riccardi in Sterling as a candidate who still believes that the county still has a top public school system.
“We are still one of the very best divisions in the state,” he said. “But there is still a lot of work left to do, especially coming out of COVID.”
He’s one of the candidates who isn’t using culture war rhetoric in his platform, but is instead trying to stay above it. “I think that’s one of the reasons I’m running,” Istrefi, who has received endorsements from Democrats, said. “The rhetoric damages our community. Our public schools are the core of this community that we all live in.”
Before the backlash to COVID measures and before Loudoun County was well-known, school board meetings were mundane affairs with light attendance. But they have since become forums where parents shout at board members over real and perceived issues facing the school system. “Parental rights” has become a rallying cry for conservative parents trying to impose their own personal values onto an entire school system.
Erika Ogedegbe, the incumbent in Leesburg, was prompted to run for office after a school board member resigned following pressure from a right-wing group.
“I had this gut reaction when I was reading a local newspaper article about the previous school board representative stepping down amid death threats against herself and her child,” she said. “I thought, ‘We can’t let that happen. We can’t just let the bullies push us out.’”
Over coffee, Ogedegbe tells me that she is originally from Brookline, Massachusetts. When she and her husband were deciding on a place to live, they chose Loudoun for the same reasons that countless other parents do.
“We were looking for great public schools and diversity,” she said. She has two adult children who graduated from Loudoun County schools and another currently in middle school.
She sees the people calling for book bans and smearing teachers as a loud, but small, minority. “I’ve heard some of these similar talking points in other areas of the country. But I don’t think it’s not the majority of our families who think that way.”
Naturally, Ogedegbe would like for board members to share her views, but in a county like Loudoun, she wants to remain realistic.
“I would like to see more folks that are aligned with me politically on the board,” Ogedegbe said. “But the reality is, we do have a mix of constituents, and we need to make sure that we’re trying to meet everyone’s needs while also not infringing on anyone’s rights.”
Ogedegbe’s opponent, Lauren Shernoff, is an independent running for the Leesburg seat. While she considers herself above what she calls “the political stuff,” it hasn’t stopped her from earning the endorsements of the 1776 Project PAC and the Loudoun County Republican Women’s Club — partially because of the belief that anything is better than the liberal Ogedegbe.
And while she shies away from the inflammatory rhetoric of some of the other candidates in the race, it’s clear that she thinks the board needs a shakeup. Fittingly, when I meet her for an interview at the early voting center in Leesburg, she’s forced to stand in the rain between the Democrats’ and Republicans’ respective tents.
“During the pandemic is when a lot of people woke up to the fact that there’s nine people here that make pretty much all the education decisions,” Shernoff said. “And if I had to sum it up in one phrase, I would say that as an educator and as a parent, the leadership in Loudoun County Public Schools is very disconnected from what’s actually happening in the schools.”
Conservatives quickly coalesced around a faux moral panic concerning public schools. They said teachers were secretly teaching critical race theory, a college-level academic scholarship about systemic racism that conservatives warped to mean anti-white sentiment. They accused teachers of peddling sexually explicit materials in the classroom. And the LGBTQ community, particularly transgender people, were smeared as predators and abusers.
Loudoun County was no exception.
Michael Rivera, who is running for the at-large district seat, meaning he’d represent the whole county, is trying to cash in on the moment.
“Culture wars dominate LCPS, and the Democratic candidates continue to persist them by claiming that multi-sex bathrooms are for ‘safety’ first and foremost, when we all know that the bathrooms are the continuation of Policy 8040 that was deceivingly passed amidst a horrible coverup of a rape at an LCPS high school,” he wrote in a September Facebook post. Policy 8040, implemented under former Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, is a set of guidelines for protecting transgender students’ rights in Virginia schools.
As school board meetings grew more contentious, a student was accused of sexually assaulting another at Ashburn’s Stone Bridge High School in May 2021. The following month, Scott Smith, the father of the victim, confronted school board members, was subsequently arrested for disorderly conduct and later convicted. The alleged perpetrator was moved to another high school, where he assaulted another student. (In September 2023, Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin pardoned Smith.)
However, at the board meeting, Smith claimed that the suspect was wearing a skirt, sparking the rumor that he is transgender.
Although an internal report from the district released in September says there is no evidence the suspect is transgender, that didn’t stop conservatives from blaming transgender students and the school officials who expressed support for policies that would help LGBTQ students.
But there was also the fact that the school board declined to release its own report on the assaults and how the perpetrator, after he switched high schools, was able to attack another student. (For his failure to properly investigate the assaults, Superintendent Scott Ziegler was fired by the board in December 2022.) The lack of transparency provided conservatives with some much-needed attack lines against the school board.
Then the right-wing activist organization Fight For Schools began a campaign to oust Beth Barts, the board member for Leesburg, for violating open meeting rules. Barts had a rocky tenure on the school board, including being censured for using social media inappropriately, but the group made it clear it was not just Barts it was after.
“The problems at Loudoun County Public Schools and on the school board go well beyond one school board member,” Ian Prior, the executive director of Fight For Schools, told The Washington Post at the time. “We…will keep fighting until we have a school board of common sense, non-partisan members and a superintendent who is accountable to parents and tells the truth.”
But before a recall election could be held, Barts resigned.
The following November, Gov. Youngkin won his election largely on a platform of “parental rights.” The term, as conservatives defined it, meant allowing parents to make decisions about their children in concurrence with their teachers.
In reality, it meant challenging books with LGBTQ+ or racial justice themes, accusing teachers of indoctrinating students and complaining about transgender students. As governor, Youngkin implemented policies that would ban transgender students from using the bathroom or playing on the sports team that matches their gender identity — but the rules aren’t enforceable, and many school districts have not said whether or not they would implement them, including in Loudoun.
Youngkin didn’t win in Loudoun or any of the surrounding counties that make up the Northern Virginia region, which is home to a majority of the state’s population. His victory in Virginia partly fueled some federal candidates to run on the same rhetoric in the 2022 midterms with varying results. By the time it was all said and done, the parental rights talking point that had swayed voters in Virginia didn’t seem to have much appeal at a broader level.
But still, it looks as if school board candidates have latched themselves to the same theory: that voters don’t care about teacher shortages or falling math and reading scores but about banning books and blocking transgender students from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
But if Loudoun County Public Schools are in such dire straits that the only thing that can fix it is a cadre of conservative school board members, it’s not obvious from the late September school board meeting.
It’s the first meeting since LCPS released the report on the pair of sexual assaults, but there is virtually no tension in the air.
After parking my car, I am greeted by large signs warning members of the public what they can’t bring inside the building, and a group of friendly security guards wave me through metal detectors before I can go find a seat in the auditorium.
All the indicators that school board meetings have been packed and at times unruly are there, but the rows and rows of chairs are pretty much empty.
Instead of angry parents against radicalized school board members, the meeting was spent recognizing an exceptional teacher, presenting awards to student athletes and discussing the progress made in the school system.
It didn’t appear to be a school system on the brink of chaos. Parents snapped photos and videos of their children being honored and of the students getting a chance to sit on the dais and talk about their hopes for the remainder of the school year.
Before the meeting hit the two-hour mark, virtually every member of the public had trickled out. The room was quiet, save for the school board members left to their task of discussing the routine business of running a large and diverse school system. The parental rights protesters were nowhere in sight.