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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The Loudon County Special Grand Jury final report has been released. [previous discussion here]

For a summary of the background: Loudoun County School District had a possibly-gender-something student sexually assault a much-younger female student who the assailant had a previous relationship with at Stone Bridge High School (SBHS) on May 28th, 2021. While eventually arrested, state law limits pre-trial detention to 21-days for this class of juvenile, and the assailant was transfered to Broad Run High School (BRHS) for the next school year. The father of this first victim was expelled from the school on the day of the assault, and later arrested by the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office (LCSO) during a school board (LCSB) meeting where he confronted or was confronted by someone (not a part of the school board?). On October 6th, the assailant further abducted and sexually assaulted another female student at BRHS.

Get used to the acronyms; the report uses them everywhere.

The report is... a read. With apologies for transcription errors:

Later that evening, a school board member asked the superintendent "do we have assaults in our bathrooms or in our locker rooms, regularly? I would hope not but I'd like clarification." The superintendent responded, "to my knowledge we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms." The SBHS principle, who attended the Teams meeting with the superintendent the afternoon the SBHS sexual assault took place, testified the superintendent's statement "is not true." Another witness testified the superintendent's statement was a "bald-faced lie." We agree.

There's two separate failures, here, that I think are worth discussion and highlighting. One is the more overt culture war, and the grand jury report does make very clear that the culture war drove a lot of bad practice. It's a little hard to tell since the report uses roles rather than names for everything, but it seems like even the last fig leaf Superintendent Zeigler was using about the controversial school board meeting, that he assumed the questions were about policy 8040-related sexual assaults rather than sexual assaults in general, was not actually true either, as an half-hour before the email previously made available, it turns out that:

At 3:30PM the chief operating officer emailed the superintendent, the now-deputy superintendent, chief of staff, directory of communications, and assistant superintendent, [stating in part]:

The incident at SBHS is related to policy 8040.

With extreme charity, perhaps this refers to the father’s near arrest, and not the rape itself, but that doesn’t absolve much.

At the same time, there's another disturbing component that I think a lot of 'mainstream' conservative critiques are likely to overlook:

The special education teaching assistant later said she saw two pairs of feet under the stall, but she did nothing about it. She testified this was not an uncommon occurrence, because "somebody could have their period. They might need a tampon. Or somebody had a boyfriend they had a fight with." The assailant later acknowledge that "They usually don't do anything" regarding two pairs of feet in a stall. After the teaching assistant left, the assailant again forced penetration against the female student...

That is, a teaching assistant -- in Virginia, a mandatory reporter -- walked past a bathroom stall where a violent rape was in-progress and, once the teaching assistant left, continued. Further, that this was not an unusual mistake, but enough of a practice that it was recognized by the offender. It's quite possible that Superintendent Ziegler was making a bald-faced lie not in the sense that this particular sexual assault occurred in a bathroom, but that there is little effort or interest in preventing dubiously consensual sexual behavior in bathrooms between students at all.

And this continued more broadly. On the day of the assault, the report details how the school was more intent on expelling an angry father and seeking a no-trespass order against him (e-mail at 3:09), even suggesting that the father "should have been arrested", than tracking down the at-large rapist (who was only grabbed at the end of the school day). Even once arrested, the local police showed little interest in bringing the case.

And even once that was done, there was a complex game of blame- and paperwork-passing that seemed optimized to lose track of things, and not just for this specific case.

However, juvenile intake did not call the superintendent's office, email the superintendent's office, or send a copy of the notification through the mail. Instead, the process in place at the time was to send it via inter-office envelope that was picked up at the courthouse. Further, the envelope was addressed to "David Spage," who is an LCPS employee but has not worked in the superintendent's office since 2014...

During the calendar year 2021, there were 39 school notifications sent [in this method], but it is unknown how many of those the superintendent's office ever saw.

((SBHS seemed to think the student had transferred to SBHS from another high school, THS, over similar allegations. The grand jury report says that this probably is confused and didn't happen? Which is another level of wtf, maybe.))

This continued even as other warning signs kept scaling up.

In the ensuing weeks after the assailant was released from custody, the court services unit learned information from the assailant's family that cause them to "keep a tight eye on this kid."

This included, separately, the assailant's grandmother and mother both requesting additional assistance from schools and the probation officer, with the grandmother calling the assailant a "sociopath."

In early September, the assailant had separate incidents at the new school, first following female students around school long enough to result in an art class shuffling the assailant's seating around, and then a more serious incident in an English classroom where the assailant tried to take a female student's Chromebook, and asked the female student about online nudes (and another boy if the boy's grandmother had online nudes?). This was escalated, yet:

The most senior individuals in LCPS knew about this incident, and knew is was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. Multiple people in the LCSO were aware of this incident around the time it occurred and kenw it was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. The deputy commonwealth's attorney prosecuting the May 28, 2021 case knew of the incident, and the probation officer, who had been communicating with the student and his family nearly daily for over a month, knew of the incident.

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

On October 6th, this escalated to a second sexual assault, this time with the assailant abducting a female student without a fig leaf of a pre-existing relationship.

In "late October", the school commissioned an independent review of the incidents at hand. However:

Many board members were surprised to learn the report was subject to the attorney-client privilege.... Several board members testified they were given only half an hour to read the independent review and ask questions about it. Despite having asked for the review in the first place, they were handed out numbered copies of it and required to return it upon leaving the room. On January 14, 2022, LCSB [County School Board] issued a public statement stating the report would not be released, listing the attorney-client privilege as the third, and least-important, reason for keeping it private. The statement [link] also noted several changes and updates to LCPS [County Public Schools] policies and procedures.

It's hard to summarize exactly how much of a shitshow this was, but :

The director of school administration disagreed with this assessment [that they could not proceed until police completed their investigation] and had conversations with the chief of staff about it in July and August 2021. The director, even those his office was not supposed to be doing Title IX, also created a Google document of possible Title IX violations reported from schools because he was "worried at the time that we were not reporting some things that could become Title IX."...

On September 17th, 2021, the director of school administration testified he emailed the superintendent, chief of staff, deputy superintendent, and chief of schools, about the situation. He testified the email laid out his extensive training, experts he had met with, and the fact the SBHS assault should have "immediately" and "automatically" triggered an investigation. It is unknown how the superintendent or these officials responded - LCPS refused to provide us this email -- but it was not until a month later, and after the BRHS sexual assault, that a Title IX investigation into the SBHS sexual assault was opend. The individual who ultimately conducted that investigation testified it was the first Title IX investigation she had ever done.

I see by recent news that they've firedthe Superintendent of the schools. Good start, but a lot more heads need to roll, and it looks like maybe some in the sheriff's department too.

That kid was woefully disturbed and should not have been in schools at all. I know it's very hard to know what to do with a juvenile, you don't want to condemn a 14/15 year old, and they are entitled to an education, but that boy was a danger to girls and needed to be getting appropriate treatment, not "well we held him for a bit in detention, now he's going to live with his granny for two weeks until he can start school again".

even the last fig leaf Superintendent Zeigler was using about the controversial school board meeting, that he assumed the questions were about policy 8040-related sexual assaults rather than sexual assaults in general, was not actually true either

Even if true, that's not a fig leaf. "Oh, you didn't mean 'rapes under our new trans-friendly policy'? You meant all those other rapes that happen in our schools? Sorry for misunderstanding you!"

Even accounting for the right-wing bias in the reporting, it sounds like the grand jury was mad as hell about the whole affair. Good. The kid at the centre of it all sounds, from other things I've read previously, to have been totally fucked-up by his dysphoric family life, and instead of doing anything to help him, the school board was all "Oh you are gender-fluid and trans and a girl? Of course you are! Feel free to use the girls' bathrooms at your own discretion! Rainbow flags aloft!" because, and this is just my own opinion, they were a bunch of spineless idiots in thrall to the local trans activist parents' group.

EDIT: Okay, to be fair to the school board, they were being kept in the dark by the administration. So it's the superintendent and the principals that should be strung up by their thumbs. There was an immense amount of "sweep it under the carpet" going on, and things were made worse by A not informing B that C had told them they were going to be working with D between the courts, the schools, the sheriff's office and pretty much everyone involved.

What I really hated afterwards were all the good progressives, online and in the media, solidly (1) engaging in victim-blaming which, in any other context, they would tear someone apart for doing and (2) suddenly they were all very, very sure that this wasn't a trans kid or gender-fluid, this was a male boy who was completely male and not really trans or any other identity he claimed, even again where they would be "if you say you're trans, you're trans!".

Yeah. Enough shame and blame to go around for every single person, including that bitch of a prosecutor who tried to hang the father of the raped girl with all her might.

I think that the trans angle is a possible read, and almost certainly a component of the story... but I think there's a lot of fingerprints that don't touch on it, and I think it's important not to miss them. There's definitely stuff like all the people insisting that the assailant was wearing a kilt, despite all everything going on, but there's also issues that had ignored other bad conduct when that bad conduct was the only real interaction they had.

In extreme cases, this involved parts of the system missed dozens of other incidents, and had for years, including in ways that never would have seen the assailant either in this case or in others, and might not have even gotten information about gender beyond the name on a piece of paper: the reporting system that had been broken for the better part of a decade falls into this group. I think the special ed teacher's assistant literally walking past a rape in progress does as well. There's plausible explanations for the complete lack of Title IX infrastructure, but more likely it's just not something anyone who should have been making the decision wanted to think for five minutes about. Same, if not more so, for the complete abdication of any role by the director of 'safety and security', the long-standing lack of cooperation between the school district and police, and the efforts to obscure the 'external' review.

There's still ways to argue these latter problems derive from culture war causes -- maybe even true ones! -- but they point to a far broader problem that I think a lot of social conservatives are ignoring in favor of the flavour of the month.

And, once the grand jury investigation had begun, the legal office's emphasis on obfuscation was not limited to its 'independent' review:

On April 22, the same attorney filed another motion to quash testimonial subpoenas on behalf of three teachers at SBHS using, again, the same arguments. The court again rejected these arguments.

In this instance, however, one of the teachers was explicitly not represented by the attorney, even though he claimed to the court in a filing that he did represent her and was advocating on her behalf. The teacher said she felt pressured by the attorney into representing her, that the attorney told her not to provide the special grand jury with anything, and that the attorney tried to "shut [her] up" because "this won't look well for the schools."...

On the date of their testimony, the two school board members did not show up. The court gave them two hours to arrive at the courthouse otherwise the court would issue a capias warrant for their arrest. The board members subsequently arrived at the courthouse in a timely manner. One of the board members testified "it was based on my counsel's advice not to show up. Otherwise, I would have been here."...

Division counsel's mere silent presence in a crowded room was enough for LCSB's lawyer to claim the attorney-client privilege and instruct the witnesses not to answer the question... LCSB's counsel also inappropriately used hand signals and other methods to communicate with witnesses while they were testifying...

We received the May 28, 2021 email from the LCPS chief operating officer regarding policy 8040 and the SBHS incident in early September, even though it should have been produced months earlier in response to the April 7 subpoena to the superintendent. Instead, this email was produced pursuant to a document subpoena to a different LCPS administrator, who had their own lawyer, and not the preferred lawyer of LCPS division counsel...

Several school board members then testified to the exact same story: the chief operating officer said the incident at SBHS had to do with policy 8040 because the father of the victim who showed up at the school that day was shouting about policy 8040.

There is absolutely no evidence the father said anything about policy 8040 that day, or that he even knew what policy 8040 was on that day. No school board member could provide any evidence that what they claimed happened had in fact happened -- even though they all parroted the same story. Interestingly, multiple school board members also corrected special counsel to the special grand jury when asked about the individual wearing a skirt in the female bathroom that day; these board members were quick to claim he was instead wearing a kilt.

It'd be convenient if all of this tail-covering was focused on Policy 8040, and no small amount of it was, yet even to the extent Policy 8040 and broader trans-related stuff comes up, the school and its officers seem more interested in avoiding any controversy or blame on any sphere and from any direction, despite their significant powers and significant responsibilities. There is little or no evidence of ability to handle a non-culture-war variant of the same types of assault, or other criminal behaviors, despite evidence that they could have been occurring (39 missed notifications in one year!).

Unfortunately, the Grand Jury report falters when it comes to a conclusion. Despite everything above:

Unlike federal law, no Virginia statute explicitly addresses witness tampering, and the Virginia obstruction of justice statute does not cover htis fact pattern. For those reasons, we were unable to consider an indictment against the LCPS division counsel.

It gives, in the place of criminal charges, a list of administrative recommendations. Some range from the obvious to the tautological :

The LCPS directory of safety and security needs to be more involved in situations that threaten the safety and security of students, faculty, and staff.

While others are, bluntly, so broad and vague as to be unactionable:

Strengthen avenues of support and advocacy for faculty and staff confronted with challenging scenarios that could pose a danger and/or impede learning.

To the nearly unrelated:

The superintendent's recommendation for the non-renewal of a teacher's contract should be the subject of a separate agenda item and not placed on the LCSB consent agenda.

((Presumably a teacher mentioned fearing termination for testifying? Maybe?))

It's a little uncomfortable to realize that the team of people studying this problem for a full year don't seem to have noticed, or if noticed, do not seem to have found it worth a bullet point, an underlying problem where this entire environment seems more interested in the text of legal compliance and avoiding liability than in the safety of their students or clear liability to longer-lasting civil torts. Yet that seems to be the room temperature, here.

It'd be convenient if all of this tail-covering was focused on Policy 8040, and no small amount of it was, yet even to the extent Policy 8040 and broader trans-related stuff comes up, the school and its officers seem more interested in avoiding any controversy or blame on any sphere and from any direction, despite their significant powers and significant responsibilities. There is little or no evidence of ability to handle a non-culture-war variant of the same types of assault, or other criminal behaviors, despite evidence that they could have been occurring (39 missed notifications in one year!).

Is this at all surprising? Totally unrelated to any trans issues--I would not be surprised at this behavior for any scandal at a public school, or indeed any institution. This is perhaps a slightly extreme example, but really only because the initial crime is so bad. (I'd like to think it might be less bad at a non-public school, but that's probably just my bias showing.)

It's a little uncomfortable to realize that the team of people studying this problem for a full year don't seem to have noticed, or if noticed, do not seem to have found it worth a bullet point, an underlying problem where this entire environment seems more interested in the text of legal compliance and avoiding liability than in the safety of their students or clear liability to longer-lasting civil torts. Yet that seems to be the room temperature, here.

Sorry to take it in this direction, but I am still fairly convinced this was the motivation and rationale behind the majority of covid policy. It was the reason for the initial reaction, the subsequent overreaction, for mask mandates, for lockdowns, for rushed testing and for vaccine mandates. Saving lives was at best secondary to covering asses. Society is run by middle aged adolescents, their greatest concern is the same as any teenager - if they admit they fucked up they might get in trouble.

The consequences for a person running society to be known to have fucked up is generally much worse than getting grounded for a week.

That's certainly true, but that's why we historically gave the job of running society to people with the maturity to recognise and admit to their mistakes. To understand that running society comes with a lot of prestige and respect and power, but also dramatically more severe consequences for mistakes - and if you do fuck it up, the consequences to you - no matter how severe - are microscopic compared to the consequences to society. Or to put it another way, if you wouldn't prefer your downfall to society's you shouldn't be running society.

But I call them middle aged adolescents because the impression I get from speaking to them and seeing/reading them in interviews is that none of that even enters their thought processes. It doesn't have time to because like an irresponsible teen the calculus terminates at 'but what if I get in trouble!?' regardless of whether the consequences are some light mocking from strangers or an international incident. I used to think this was only something kids raised by narcissists did. I still sometimes think that.

but that's why we historically gave the job of running society to people with the maturity to recognise and admit to their mistakes.

That seems like the opposite of reality.

but also dramatically more severe consequences for mistakes - and if you do fuck it up, the consequences to you - no matter how severe - are microscopic compared to the consequences to society.

This kind of thing (more severe consequences of mistakes) incentivizes ass covering. If you want to incentivize 'admitting mistakes', then again, you'd need to do the opposite.

I don't want to incentivise anything. I am simply stating a fact - if you are running society, fucking up has more severe consequences than if you aren't running society. And separately, regardless of how much you personally suffer from the consequences of your mistakes, they will pale in comparison to the suffering of the society you fucked up.

While I do agree there are people out there who get scared by harsh consequences but are too power hungry/narcissistic to take that as a sign they shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of society, they are the aforementioned middle aged adolescents.

I'm not totally sure what the difference is, but I have some ideas. Aside from narcissist parents, it could also be to do with the level of comfort - as the saying goes, hard times breed hard people and soft times breed soft people. Which is why, if you want to see leaders of the calibre I mentioned, you look at times of war and hardship - times where fucking up might result in being conquered or getting everyone you know killed. Or for modern examples you look in places where violence is still just a part of life - gangs, cartels, crime families.

If you are thinking 'the king who fell on his sword for his country is rarer than Tyr the vanquishing warlord' you are right, but kings are supposed to be outside of the chain of responsibility - and they often led rather comfy lives. Generals though, and other military officers, did it so often they have memes about it. Falling on their sword for example, which dates back to the classical era but is most often associated these days with Bushido culture. And dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori - which prior to world war 1 was used entirely unironically.

I guess I have to get back to my main point, although I have no idea what to say, it's all so bizarre. The consequences of an action are what they are. A pr campaign isn't going to change them even if it changes the perception of them. And what do you think will happen when people find out that you... massaged the presentation of the consequences? We don't have to wonder, that exact deceitful strategy was employed repeatedly during covid. And all it did was destroy trust and lead to a situation where nobody knew what the consequences were, couldn't ask anyone and succumbed to fear. Beside that, if you are in a position to shape the presentation of consequences to the leaders of society, they aren't the leaders of society - you are.

Has any society ever been good at selecting for leaders who will fall on their sword if need be?

Japan, literally.

It's a little uncomfortable to realize that the team of people studying this problem for a full year don't seem to have noticed, or if noticed, do not seem to have found it worth a bullet point, an underlying problem where this entire environment seems more interested in the text of legal compliance and avoiding liability than in the safety of their students or clear liability to longer-lasting civil torts. Yet that seems to be the room temperature, here.

Black pill- the people studying this do not see it as a problem. The goal is to legally comply with the text and preserve any bureaucracy from accountability. It is not to protect either the institution or the students- schools don’t care about large financial liabilities, they’ll just raise taxes to cover it, and no one in this bureaucracy is at any point incentivized to care about the kids.

In the sense that the school administration and board didn't see it as a problem in that way, yes, and indeed the grand jury report spells it out, if perhaps in circumspect terms:

... throughout this investigation we have learned LCPS as an organization tends to avoid managing difficult situations by not addressing them fully.

In the sense that the grand jury recommendations are couched in terms of policies that would preserve the school bureaucracy from accountability, kinda. There's actually a pretty serious indictment of the school system's near-complete abdication of responsibility -- literally, that LCPS "bears the brunt of the blame" -- as well as individual actors. And yet, those bad actors are named only by role, not by name; the efforts toward encouraging the bureaucracy to be better couched entirely within the assumption that the school administration would remain consumed by and for administrators above students. Nor could the administration be above individual people; quite a lot of the obfuscation from the LCPS legal counsel seems focused on covering the individual reputations of bad actors even at the expense of the school's reputation.

We don't know the members of the grand jury, but they were appointed by a local Republican for whatever that matters. And yet they don't seem to be willing to burn down the administration or to encourage putting safety above Goodharting, even as they say the only reason they did not deliver an indictment was a lack of sufficiently close statute. If they too are captured, there's a fun question first of how, but also of what capture means when it can be so broad as to include them.

To be honest, there’s lots and lots of republicans that do boring work like this(and yes, no matter how juicy the situation originating the investigation, this is a lot of boring work) who are extremely literal-textualist in outlook and so will do things like not recommend charges for gross negligence because there isn’t a sufficiently close statute.

It does seem like the only consequences of this will be empowering awful Title IX regulations and the hiring of another dozen administrators to impose them. Talk about victory even in defeat.

It's by design. They control the entire pipeline from front to back. They set the bar for what credentials are required. They hand out those credentials. They control what gets taught to acquire those credentials. They interview the candidates for the positions. There are no counterfactuals where dissidents are allowed anywhere near attempting to mitigate the problem.

So how to break that ? Change legislation ?

Now, bear with me here, my public school experience was overall good. But if you're talking about preventing the abuse of children, I think you're going to run into the problem of Child Abduction Is Not Funny. As much ideological weirdness happens in schools, and as infuriating as these incidents are, they're infuriating because it's public officials that are supposed to be accountable being unaccountable. Like being killed by a seatbelt or airbag or police officer.

But, most child abuse happens at home. It's mostly the parents and close family doing it, and at school there's people who will notice bruises, and so long as the parent isn't too Intersectional, they will investigate. I'm just not a fan of widespread homeschooling; the more of it there is, the harder it becomes to audit, and I don't trust un-audited homeschooling

The natural state of children is to be with other children doing children stuff. It's unfortunate that school is the main place where other children are.

Uh, isn’t the vast majority of child abuse in the home stepdads or stepbrothers, a group that is very underrepresented in homeschooling?

It's a coup complete problem.

There is no breaking it. You need parallel institutions from the ground up. Parallel school, parallel training, parallel gatekeeping, which is the most important part. You can't just start a new school, and connect it to the pipeline of ideological enemies being churned out of the institutions you fled from. You need to actively keep them the fuck out.

Unfortunately, keeping them out is likely to be "discriminatory", so you are just fucked. If you even try you'll get sued into oblivion. We simply are not permitted to have institutions which serve our needs.

But you can't use legislative change to starve these institutions so they wither?

We tried. Youngkin specifically rolled back a lot of these policies. People are no longer allowed to use whatever bathroom they please and schools are no longer allowed to secretly transition people's children. This is something he is allowed to do with executive power.

The schools just said "We don't care, we do what we want." It's probably going to be tied up in court until they can get a (D) in the office who will make it all go away. Northern VA is chocked full of branch covidians who still drive alone in their cars wearing masks, and believe Republican's are literally murdering people, on purpose, with their pro family, pro liberty policies. Recently my district was gerrymandered to take a 95% Republican county, and attach just enough of Fairfax County to it so that it will reliably seat a far left Democrat. I've been effectively completely denied representation. There is zero overlap between the interest of the county I live in, and the county that got to choose my representative. I'm fucked.

Northern VA is chocked full of branch covidians

You know better. If you don't want people calling you a Rethuglican or a Magtard, you don't get to do this.

If the shoe fits...

Listen, if I were advocating for Republicans to rise up violently, Rethuglican wouldn't be a bad fit. If I were advocating that Trump was still a genius, and this was all part of his 43d chess, Magtard wouldn't be a bad fit. And if you commute 90 minutes to work, alone, in your car, with a mask on, branch covidian fits.

Am I on some fucking short list of people you feel compelled fucking annoy whenever they use slightly creative language? Do you know what the no-no words are ahead of time, or do you just see myself enjoying writing too much and decide to be a killjoy?

I didn't call a user here a branch covidian, I didn't make sweeping generalization. I described a specific set of behaviors and beliefs, and used an appropriate descriptor for it. If you don't drive 90 minutes to work alone wearing a mask, be not offended, be not inflamed.

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