The NSBA apologized in 2021. The Loudoun lawsuit it never reckoned with is now Exhibit E

In October 2021, the National School Boards Association said it was sorry. It had asked President Biden to bring the PATRIOT Act and the FBI's counterterrorism division to bear on parents at school board meetings, and its board wrote to members that "there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter."

Five years later, the Justice Department has published what the NSBA's apology left out: the full story of the Loudoun County family behind the letter's only Virginia example.

DOJ's 273-page "2026 Report to Expose the Weaponization of Government Against Parents in Schools," released this week and dated Oct. 5, reprints the NSBA's Sept. 29, 2021 letter as Appendix C and its apology as Appendix D. Appendix E is the 37-page federal complaint in Jane Doe v. The Loudoun County School Board, filed Oct. 24, 2025, in federal court in Alexandria.

The juxtaposition is the point. Here is how the NSBA letter, written from its Alexandria headquarters, described Loudoun: "In Virginia, an individual was arrested, another man was ticketed for trespassing, and a third person was hurt during a school board meeting discussion distinguishing current curricula from critical race theory and regarding equity issues." It then said such incidents "could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes."

According to the DOJ report, the arrested man was Scott Smith. Smith told a DOJ roundtable this June, "I wasn't there for a political debate. I was there because my child had been violated." According to the lawsuit the report reprints, weeks earlier his 15-year-old daughter, a student with disabilities, had been sexually assaulted in a girls' restroom at Stone Bridge High School by a male student wearing female attire.

The complaint lays out what it says happened next, and every line is an allegation the defendants have yet to answer in court. A school employee saw two pairs of feet under the stall door and took no action. A staff member told the girl's mother only that her daughter had been "beat up." A counselor told the mother, "Shh... We can't talk about it." The principal reported the incident upward as an "attempted" rape and sought a "no trespass letter" against the girl's father. The district's chief operating officer emailed then-Superintendent Scott Ziegler that afternoon that "the incident at SBHS is related to policy 8040," Loudoun's proposal to open girls' facilities to students who identify as female.

That evening, the complaint says, a Ziegler-approved message told Stone Bridge families "there was no threat to the safety of the student body." Ziegler emailed the School Board about the assault the same day. School counselors were offered to students who had seen the father's angry outburst, but never to the girl.

Then came June 22. At a public meeting, Ziegler said, "To my knowledge, we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms," and "the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist." The complaint calls that a lie. Smith was arrested at that meeting. Three months later, the NSBA was citing that arrest to the White House as a reason for federal intervention.

According to the complaint, the attacker was never disciplined by the school system. He was moved to Broad Run High School because of a court order. There, on Oct. 6, 2021, two days after Attorney General Merrick Garland issued his memo answering the NSBA, he sexually assaulted another student. The complaint says Ziegler did not tell the board it was the same student. Board members learned it from a news article. The student was convicted in the Stone Bridge case in October 2021. The district's Title IX investigation did not begin until Oct. 19, 2021.

The NSBA's own commissioned review, also reprinted in the DOJ report, found that its letter was never approved by its board and that a White House adviser had advance knowledge of its contents. By Nov. 5, 2021, seven state associations had dropped their NSBA memberships.

The NSBA's apology said parents "should and must continue to be heard." It did not mention Loudoun. It did not mention Smith. As the DOJ report notes, his prosecution ended only when then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin pardoned him.

Smith told a DOJ roundtable in June that he learned he had been "named a domestic terrorist" when a reporter called him for comment. "Waking up in the morning after your daughter had just been raped" and getting that call, he said, "was bone chilling."

The girl, now 19, is suing for damages under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause. The defendants' side of the story is not in the report, and they deserve their day in court. But the NSBA's description of Loudoun as a meeting about "equity issues" now sits in the same document as the complaint, and readers can compare the two for themselves.

Email the Loudoun County School Board:
April Chandler, april.chandler@lcps.org,
Anne Donohue, anne.donohue@lcps.org,
Deana Griffiths, deana.griffiths@lcps.org,
Ross Svenson, ross.stevenson@lcps.org,
Kari LaBell, kari.labell@lcps.org,
Jon Pepper, jonathon.pepper@lcps.org,
Lauren Shernoff, lauren.shernoff@lcps.org,
Sumera Rashid, sumera.rashid@lcps.org,
Amy Riccardi, amy.riccardi@lcps.org,

Loudoun County is a county in Northern Virginia. Its county seat is Leesburg.