Loudoun County

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has delivered a major win for the school board parents who helped propel him to victory in 2021. Starting in October, the state's public schools will be required to adhere to a new policy regarding transgender students. The updated guidance, first reported by the Daily Wire, is rooted in truth, parental rights, and plain ol' common sense. Transgender students are now only allowed to change their names on official documents with permission from their parents. Students must also demonstrate a "persistent and sincere belief" that they identify as a different gender. "Overnight travel accommodations, locker rooms and other intimate spaces used for school-related activities and events shall be based on sex,” the policy also says.

“Republicans can and must become the party of parents.” So said Congressman Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, in an Election Day missive as CNN and MSNBC propagandists hurled racial vitriol at Virginia voters. Banks is right. But the Republican Party already is the de facto party of parents. Democrats, through the machinations of their radical-woke apparatchiks, have made themselves the Anti-Parent Party. GOP lawmakers are welcome, albeit late to the fight. The RSC’s dispatch recalls Joseph Stalin’s declaration of war on Japan after America A-bombed Hiroshima. Alas, there is no mistaking the Red Army pincer movement in Manchuria with the RSC’s memo, which observed, “There is real energy from parents that we need to understand.

Most Americans want schools to promote knowledge and champion principles of human decency. They want schools to be safe. They do not want children race-shamed, or exposed to the anomic and depraved. A fourteen-year-old boy wandering around campus — any campus — wearing a floor-length dress doesn’t sound wholesome to them. What’s going on in “our” schools, some ask, and not in a sunny way. Too many know from experience, at least in metro and blue-liberal districts, that any parent who avows the Ten Commandments or praises the Boy Scout Law might get the fish-eye from the principal. If dad objects to critical race theory or transgender bathrooms, heads explode. A frosty diversity lecture might not suffice. Should we call security or 911?

Attend a Loudoun County school board meeting in Virginia, and you will find it almost as locked down as the US Capitol post-January 6. Police cars line the streets and dozens of security personnel post up inside the building. I attended the most recent meeting on Tuesday as media and was subject to a thorough bag check and extensive metal scanning. Residents who wish to speak at meetings are not even allowed in the building until they are in the next group of ten scheduled to appear, and they are not allowed to bring in bags or purses. Chairs for the public are socially distanced, limiting the number of people who can even sit inside.

For months, widespread parent-led uprisings against school boards have pitted everyday mothers and fathers against powerful political bureaucracies. Skirmishes across the country have revealed the radicalism — and ruthlessness — of the educators and administrators who run the American education system. But none have been as gruesome as that of Scott Smith, the Loudoun County father who became a target of the managerial class that presides over the wealthy northern Virginia suburb.

Tensions ran high at the Loudoun County School Board meeting on Tuesday evening, following a Virginia judge’s decision to reinstate an elementary school teacher suspended for refusing to call transgender students by their preferred pronouns. Earlier, Circuit Judge James E. Plowman Jr ordered the school district to ‘immediately reinstate’ Tanner Cross as a physical education instructor at Leesburg Elementary School. Cross was suspended for speaking out at a board meeting in late May against a proposed policy that required teachers to use transgender students' preferred pronouns and names. On June 1, Cross filed a lawsuit against the district's superintendent Scott A.