Voters in Loudoun County, Virginia, elected an entirely new slate of school board members on Tuesday, closing the door on a tumultuous chapter for the school district that thrust the region into the national spotlight.
The Tuesday election was the first since the northern Virginia county became the epicenter of the parental rights movement that formed in the wake of COVID-19 school closures in 2021.
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The county was the backdrop to Gov. Glenn Youngkin's (R-VA) upset victory over Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe in 2021 as the political newcomer capitalized on a wave of voter anxiety about the state of education in Virginia. Loudoun served as the catalyst for voter concerns when parent Scott Smith, whose daughter was raped in the girl's bathroom of a district high school, was arrested at a June 2021 school board meeting. The board had been considering policy 8040, which would allow students to use bathrooms based on their claimed gender identity rather than their biological sex.
The image of Smith's arrest proved enduring. A victorious Youngkin and newly elected state Attorney General Jason Miyares vowed to investigate what actions the school board took after the rape of Smith's daughter, who was the first of two victims assaulted by a high school student in 2021. The second assault occurred after the student was moved to a different high school in the district.
A Miyares-impaneled special grand jury ultimately indicted then-Superintendent Scott Ziegler on misdemeanor charges and issued a scathing report that blasted the school board for its handling of the situation.
But Tuesday was the first time since the scandal that voters had the opportunity to make their voices heard. Perhaps sensing an impending reckoning, only two incumbent board members opted to run for reelection, and both candidates lost.
Turnout for the election on Tuesday exceeded turnout for the board elections in 2019, with the number of votes cast in the at-large race this year increasing by nearly 25,000 votes over 2019.
Erika Ogedegbe, who won a special election last year for the Leesburg district seat, lost her bid for a full term to independent Lauren Shernoff by 53%-46%. The other incumbent, Harris Mahedavi, is likely headed out the door after narrowly losing to Deana Griffiths in a race for the Ashburn district seat. The current margin of victory for Griffiths is less than 200 votes.
Elsewhere, Democratic-endorsed Anne Donohue beat out Republican-backed Michael Rivera for the board's at-large seat. April Moore Chandler handily defeated Republican-endorsed candidate Viktoria Hunyadi for the Algonkian district seat, while the Democratic Party-backed Linda Deans defeated Chris Hodges for the Broad Run seat. Melinda Mansfield secured the Dulles district seat in an uncontested race. Karen LaBell, who was supported by the Republican Party, defeated Megan Lockwood for the Catoctin district seat.
Another Democratic-supported candidate, Sumera Rashid, is poised to defeat Republican-backed Joe Smith for the newly created Little River district seat. Rashid currently leads by a razor-thin margin of 174 votes.
Griffiths' likely victory, along with Shernoff and LaBell, will give conservative candidates three seats on the board. Democratic-endorsed candidates secured the remaining six seats, ensuring that the liberal majority in place during the past four years endures for another four-year term.
And while the school board was the focus of most attention, Commonwealth Attorney Buta Biberaj, who had prosecuted Smith for his arrest at the June 2021 board meeting and was disqualified from cases involving the board, was narrowly defeated by Republican Bob Anderson. Biberaj had been supported by Justice and Public Safety PAC, a political action committee funded by liberal megadonor George Soros.
Ian Prior, the executive director of Loudoun-based political action committee Fight for Schools, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that the results largely lined up with his expectations for the election.
"Going into last night, I certainly thought that four seats were within the realm of significant possibility, and indeed they were," he said. "The conservative candidates won three seats, and the fourth seat is within recount territory. ... For a fifth seat, things would have had to break perfectly."
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Despite the failure to secure a conservative majority on the board, Prior said the fact that most of the incumbents did not run for reelection was a recognition that voters were unhappy with the board's work over the past four years.
"The message was, 'We want things to calm down,'" Prior said. "We're still willing to elect Democrats, but we don't want Democrats to perform the way that the Democrats over the past four years have performed. And I think that's also backed up by the fact that it looks like Biberaj is going to lose because she was involved in all of that as well."