LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va. — The Loudoun County School Board voted Tuesday night not to publicly release its report on its handling of sexual assaults that led to the firing of its superintendent in December.
Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) fire its superintendent, Dr. Scott Ziegler, following a grand jury investigation of two sexual assaults on school grounds in May and October 2021, along with officials' lacking responses.
The vote to fire Ziegler was unanimous.
Tuesday night's meeting was to debate releasing the report, but the vote ultimately failed 3-6.
The School Board cited a number of reasons why the report should not be released publicly.
The report was commissioned in anticipation of litigation involving LCPS and the school board, and a news release from the school district Tuesday claimed the report contained "attorney work product and attorney-client privileged communications that are central to those matters."
“Under the best of circumstances, waiving attorney-client privilege is fraught with pitfalls, which is why it is done exceedingly rarely. Being open and transparent is important, but so is the right of our students and staff to be able to communicate with legal counsel without it being made public – that is such an important principle that it’s one of the cornerstones of the American legal system,” Board Chair Ian Serotkin said in the news release. “Releasing the report would cause a subject matter waiver of every communication anyone in LCPS had with legal counsel broadly related to these incidents over the past year and a half. If I could disentangle the release of the report from that, I would. But we cannot.”
The school district also said the report contained information on students that is protected by FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act that protects information on students.
The school district claimed it did not want to redact the specific details on students in fear of being seen as not transparent.
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