Former Loudoun County Superintendent Indicted over Handling of Sexual-Assault Cases
Loudoun County Public Schools former superintendent Scott Ziegler and public information officer Wayde Byard were indicted by a special grand jury amid an eight-month investigation into the district’s mishandling of two sexual assault cases.
A Loudoun County judge unsealed the indictments on Monday.
Ziegler was charged with one count of false publication, one count of prohibited conduct, and one count of penalizing an employee for a court appearance. The special grand jury issued indictments against the former superintendent on June 14 and September 28 for offenses that allegedly happened June 7 and June 22.
Byard was charged with a count of felony perjury. The indictment against Byard was issued September 28 for an offense that allegedly happened on August 2.
The unsealing comes after the Loudoun County school board fired Ziegler in a closed-door meeting last week following the release of a special grand jury report that said district administrators pursued their own interest instead of that of their students in handling cases of student sexual assault in 2021.
A male high-school student allegedly sexually assaulted two female students in the LCPS district between May and October of 2021.
The “gender-fluid” male student, who was wearing a skirt at the time, allegedly sodomized a ninth-grade girl in the girl’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School. The perpetrator was transferred to another LCPS school, Broad Run High School (BRHS), where he allegedly sexually assaulted another female student. He allegedly “abducted” the girl from a hallway and forced her into an empty classroom where he nearly suffocated and sexually assaulted her, according to the grand jury report.
A 15-year-old boy was convicted of both assaults and sentenced to complete a “residential program in a locked-down facility.”
In April, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares called for the special grand jury review of the district’s handling of the assaults.
“There were several decision points for senior LCPS administrators, up to and including the superintendent, to be transparent and step in and alter the sequence of events leading up to the October 6, 2021 BRHS sexual assault,” the grand jury report reads. “They failed at every juncture.”
The grand jury found the second assault “could have, and should have, been prevented.”
The initial assault in the girls bathroom drew attention to the district’s policy of allowing transgender students to access bathrooms and locker rooms that align with “their consistently asserted gender identity.” The policy was not officially adopted until shortly after the alleged bathroom assault.
The victim’s father spoke out against the policy at a school board meeting, where he was told there was no record of a sexual assault occurring in the bathroom. The father was forcibly escorted out of the meeting by police.
