There's a frightening pattern going on in Virginia, as another district is revealed to have covered up rape allegations, with the alleged incident in question taking place last October at Minnie Howard High School in the Alexandria City Public Schools district. Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women's Forum, has the details at National Review:
We have learned that Alexandria school district and school board withheld information from parents about a violent sexual assault by multiple people in a city high school, one that sent the victim to the hospital and led to a police investigation. Alexandria police have now directly confirmed to Independent Women’s Forum via email that the police arrested a 14-year-old suspect in early December for “aggravated sexua[l] battery, rape, and forcible sodomy” in connection with the October incident at Minnie Howard campus. The police declined to share additional detail about the incident due to the fact that both the victim and suspect are juveniles. And Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) chief of school and public relations Julia Burgos said that “we are unable to provide information regarding specifics about students.”
A recent Freedom of Information Act request also unearthed a concerning series of emails about the reported sexual assault at Minnie Howard High School last October. Among the recipients and participants in the emails are school-board members, the superintendent, the mayor, and Alexandria police. Parents, however, were largely left in the dark.
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The emails were exchanged just days before a joint board-council hearing focused on reinstating school resource officers to the city’s school campuses, after a previous school-board decision removing the police generated controversy.
Around the halfway point in that six-hour-long meeting, in response to a question from a council member who wanted an “overview” of the incidents that had occurred in the schools, several were listed without much detail — including “a potential sexual assault that is being investigated.” This aside amounted to the only public notification of the rape requiring hospitalization to parents, who continued sending their kids to Minnie Howard and other Alexandria schools without critical information about student safety.
The school board, superintendent, and mayor had made the apparent decision to withhold the full scope of the details while families all over the state were swarming contentious school-board meetings on topics ranging from transparency and curriculum to their children’s safety at school.
On October 6, 2021, ACPS superintendent Gregory Hutchings sent an email to the nine-member ACPS school board with the subject “Potential Sexual Assault.” The body of the email contained few details but did say (brackets mine), “FYI there is a potential sexual assault of a student by other students this afternoon at MH [Minnie Howard]. The student has been taken to the hospital and APD [Alexandria Police Department] is working through the investigation. No more details at this time.” In turn, the chairwoman of the school board, Meagan Alderton, notified Mayor Justin Wilson and all city councilors.
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The only response came not from the district or school-board officials but from Police Chief Hayes, who confirmed that a sexual assault at the school was under investigation and assured the parent that he was working with school administrators on the matters outlined. Hayes’s email was compassionate, agreeing with the parent that “the behaviors we are seeing in the public schools are unacceptable.” But no further information was released to parents or the community.
Several rapes were also committed by one student throughout different schools that were likewise covered up in Loudoun County, another blue district in northern Virginia. The perpetrator, a now 15-year-old male who wore a skirt and entered the women's restroom, was sentenced in January to residential treatment and was initially supposed to be placed on the sex offender registry list for life, though the judge ultimately reversed her decision.
Commonwealth Attorney Buta Biberaj, who in her career has been financially supported by George Soros and former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, failed to file the proper paperwork for sex offender registration in the case, as Tyler O'Neil covered at Fox News.
As Chrissy Clark reported on Wednesday for The Daily Caller, the district also did not properly notify parents of a physical assault that took place between two girls in the school district at Stone Bridge High School on February 25.
Loudoun County Sheriff Office told @DailyCaller that a female student was served w/ 3 petitions for assault, strangulations & abduction by force
— Chrissy Clark (@chrissyclark_) March 16, 2022
LCPS will not disclose whether the student is still at school
Full details here:https://t.co/s5dM2S1Oz2 https://t.co/ODmtkoDw6s
As I've covered at length, the district instead seems to have cared more about training staff on how to go about getting arrest warrants to charge parents and students with trespassing if they showed up to school without masks.
The Loudoun County School Board was involved in a lawsuit over mask mandates with Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, both Republicans who took office earlier this year. Loudoun County Circuit Court Judge James Fisher last month found in favor of parents who sued the school board for not complying with an executive order from Youngkin that empowered parents to decide if their children would wear masks to school.
What may have contributed to a lack of transparency is a law that passed the Virginia state legislature in 2020 and was signed by then-Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat. The House of Delegates and Senate were also controlled by Democrats at the time. The law in question, as I covered last October, is House Bill 257, which went into effect on July 1, 2020.
Under the law, school districts no longer have to alert law enforcement about misdemeanors that occur, including sexual battery.
In her article, Stepman noted that a bill was introduced in November 2021 to reverse the law and would require reporting of serious misdemeanor crimes. It's passed both chambers and is waiting for the governor's signature.