Spiked Reports: Loudoun County in northern Virginia is the epicentre of the parents’ rights movement in the US. School officials in Loudoun have aggressively pursued a cultural agenda, introducing children to ideas about critical race theory and gender-identity ideology, over the heads of parents.

An enduring image from that battle came from a raucous Loudoun school-board meeting in June 2021, when Scott Smith, a father of a high-school student, was wrestled to the ground by police and arrested. Smith was angry that school officials had remained silent about the rape of his daughter in the girls’ bathroom by a ‘genderfluid’ teenage boy wearing a kilt.

That image of Smith being arrested was used by the media to portray the parents’ movement as extreme and violent. The National School Boards Association cited Smith’s arrest in a letter it sent to President Biden in September 2021, which called for protesting parents to be treated akin to domestic terrorists. In turn, that letter spurred attorney general Merrick Garland to direct the FBI to investigate threats against school officials and teachers.

Smith and other protesting parents have now been vindicated. A special grand-jury investigation found last month that Loudoun school administrators attempted to cover up two sexual assaults in the district, both committed by the same ‘genderfluid’ boy. Following the publication of the grand jury’s report, Loudoun schools superintendent Scott Ziegler has been fired. He also faces three criminal indictments.