Loudoun4 All Statement on the Recall Filing for LCPS School Board Vice Chair Atoosa Reaser
On Thursday, Right-Wing PAC, Fight for Schools filed recall documents in Loudoun County Circuit Court. The filing is an attempt to malign Loudoun County School Board member Atoosa Reaser. This is part of a country-wide effort to use recalls to subvert the results of free and fair elections. Ballotpedia has tracked 84 school board recall efforts against 215 board members nationwide in 2021. Recalls against multiple board members are being pushed in Loudoun as well as in neighboring Fairfax County.
Far right candidates have lost elections in Loudoun and Fairfax by significant margins. A small portion of the electorate, led by a radical alt-right group, is using recalls to try to push their agenda since they cannot win elections. In Virginia, there is no true “recall” process that would result in another free and fair election, either the Board would choose a replacement or the courts would. These petitions are being filed with the goal of removing enough members in order to force the courts to appoint new officials in the place of those that have been duly elected. Recalls are meant to be used in case of a dereliction of duty or when criminal activity has been proven. For a full list of reasons that an elected official may be recalled see: § 24.2-233. (Effective January 1, 2024) Removal of elected and certain appointed officers by courts.
In the case of Reaser, the basis of the recalls is largely a combination of misinformation and outright lies. The filing alleges that Reaser violated open meeting laws by being a member of community Facebook groups. Being a member of a Facebook group does not constitute a violation of open meeting laws. In fact, multiple School Board Members have communicated that they have consulted with lawyers, who confirmed that their presence in moderated groups does not constitute any kind of violation. One would be hard pressed to find anyone in any elected office who is not a member of any moderated Facebook groups.
In a recent interview with MRCTV, Ian Prior, a former Trump official and political operative who worked under Jeff Sessions, explained his desire to recall or force resignations of a majority of the school board members so that a court would be forced to fill vacancies. Loudoun4All believes in fair and free elections and respects the will of the voters. This blatant attempt to override the will of the people to abuse the recall system in order to win seats after losing an election should not be tolerated. We call on all school board members to denounce the recall efforts and pledge their support to fight all recalls regardless of the target.
Fight for Schools, the organization driving these recalls, is a right-wing Political Action Committee headed by Ian Prior. His PAC has been aggressively pushing misinformation about the schools, mostly centered around Critical Race Theory, an advanced graduate level theory that is not being (and never has been) taught at K-12 schools. CRT appears to be the label that FFS is slapping on all equity efforts at LCPS. Prior is purposely ignoring the fact that the VA Attorney General found that LCPS’s policies and practices did, in fact, result in a disparate impact that harmed Black/African-American and Latinx/Hispanic students. LCPS is required, by law, to work on a plan immediately in order to implement initiatives that would fix these disparities. There is a list of the enforceable slate of commitments that LCPS is required to implement.
Recalls are being initiated not just against school board members but against other elected officials as well, including local health officials and our own commonwealth’s attorney, officials that do not align with the alt-right’s ideologies. Recalls are intended to be used in cases of serious malfeasance. Instead, they are being used to circumvent elections, since the January 6th insurrection failed to subvert the Democratic Process. Elections, not the abuse of the recall procedure, should choose our leaders.