Statement on the Recall Filing for LCPS School Board Chair, Brenda Sheridan
On Tuesday, 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 Brenda Sheridan. 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. However, to remove an elected official in Virginia a petition only needs a signature count equal to 10% of the votes cast in the previous election for that office. A small portion of the electorate, led by a radical right wing group, is using recalls to try to push their agenda since they cannot win elections.
Along with the recalls, school board members have received numerous death threats, resulting in one School Board Member resigning after having police stationed outside her home. When recalls don’t work, threats of violence and instilling fear are used instead.
In the case of Sheridan, the basis of the recalls is largely a combination of misinformation and outright lies. The filing alleges that Sheridan violated open meeting laws by being a member of community Facebook groups. Simply being in a Facebook group has never constituted a violation of open meeting laws. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find anyone in any elected office who is not a member of any moderated Facebook groups. 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.
The filing further accuses Sheridan of violating First Amendment rights when the board halted public comment during a June meeting. Members of the public refused to heed multiple warnings about following public decorum rules. Per School Board Policy 2520, the civility, decorum and respect for the functioning and dignity of the School Board shall be maintained at all times. In fact, Loudoun County has one of the most open policies on public comment in the region. Unlike neighboring counties, Loudoun does not place restrictions on the total number of people that can speak during the comment period. To suggest that it is a violation of first amendment rights is absurd. If speakers can not adhere to the rules and bylaws of the governing body they are addressing, then they cannot continue to address that body.
Lastly, the filing blames Sheridan for the handling of the now infamous sexual assault case, despite the fact that the School Board is not the administrative body in charge of handling disciplinary actions against students. Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, the Courts, and LCPS Admin are all involved, but the school board is given only the most basic notification of events. They must remain neutral should a case need to be appealed to the Board (this particular case was not). Blaming Sheridan for this case is, at best, a deep misunderstanding of the process, and at worst, a deliberate attempt at misinformation and misdirection. While all school board members were given the same information at the same time, groups such as Fight For Schools have only targeted school board members that they disagree with politically. Recall petitions for conservative members are suspiciously missing from their list. We call on all Loudoun County residents to continue to listen, understand the facts, and reject misinformation.
Fight for Schools, the organization driving these recalls, is a right-wing Political Action Committee headed by Ian Prior, a former Trump official and political operative who worked under Jeff Sessions. 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. Any 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.