by Kerry Dougherty
What is it with Loudoun County school officials? They’re strangely fond of keeping secrets. They don’t like parents. And they never seem to learn from their mistakes.
In 2021 they hid incidents of sexual assaults from parents.
Last month they hid a fentanyl epidemic at Park View High School from parents for more than two weeks.
In fact, it took former Virginia Beach School Superintendent Aaron Spence, who now heads the Loudoun division, 20 days to inform parents that students at Park View were overdosing on fentanyl left and right.
Astonishing.
This guy seems to have absolutely no sense of urgency when it comes to the safety of students.
At last count, nine students in that one school OD’d last month. According to the sheriff’s department four of the students overdosed in school and five overdosed off campus. Three students required Narcan to reverse the effects of the deadly drug and two required CPR to be revived.
Investigators believe kids have been taking counterfeit oxycodone that has been laced with fentanyl. The drug comes in the form of round blue pills emblazoned with an “M.”
That information might have been handy for parents to have as soon as the deadly drugs started to move. Instead, school officials were mum for almost three weeks.
When parents were finally informed of the overdoses on Halloween, many were livid that they weren’t notified immediately after the first kid nearly died.
“This is exactly what I’ve been talking about,” the governor explained. ”Parents need to know about these things immediately so they can speak to their children and gain information.’’
“We cannot allow administrators to sit on this information.… Here we are again with Loudoun County not sharing important information with parents and I’m not going to allow this to happen…that is why I issued the executive order last night.”
Excellent move, but it’s mindboggling that such an order was even necessary.
At least one Loudoun School Board member sided with the governor:
“Why was there a delay until Oct. 31 in letting the community know?” Loudoun County School Board member Tiffany Polifko asked NBC Channel 4.
“We cannot regain trust that’s been lost in this school system over the last several years and improve transparency if we don’t tell parents what’s going on,” she said.
Yep, it looks like Loudoun County has done it again. They’ve handed Republicans a powerful campaign issue in the closing days of an important Virginia election. Youngkin and his running mates were catapulted into office in 2021 in large part on the issue of parental rights.
Those on the left who owe their souls to the teachers unions and who want to shut parents out of the education system should be in deep trouble on Tuesday.
Fingers crossed.
Republished with permission from Kerry: Unemployed and Unedited.
