A member of the Loudoun County, Va., Board of Supervisors has threatened to call for the withholding of funds from the county’s school system unless school officials release a report they hired a law firm to prepare as part of an investigation into the school system’s handling of two sexual assaults committed by a 15-year-old boy who was incorrectly identified as “gender fluid.”

When reports surfaced last October that the boy allegedly committed one of the two assaults in the girl’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, Va., in May 2021 while wearing a skirt, the revelation triggered a furious backlash against Virginia’s statewide transgender school policy that had been adopted by Loudoun County.

The policy, which is based on LGBTQ nondiscrimination legislation passed by the Virginia General Assembly, allows transgender and gender fluid students to use the bathroom and other school facilities that conform to their gender identity.

Loudoun school officials apologized for their handling of the two sexual assault incidents and commissioned an independent investigation by a law firm after news surfaced that they transferred the boy to another high school after he was charged in the first sexual assault without alerting the other school of the charges pending against him. The boy was charged with sexually assaulting another girl in a vacant classroom on Oct. 6, 2021, at Broad Run High School, also in Ashburn.

Loudoun school officials have declined to release the report conducted by the law firm Blankingship & Keith, saying to do so would violate attorney-client privilege and would release information about individuals involved in the sexual assault cases. The identity of the 15-year-old boy charged in the two cases and the two girls he allegedly assaulted have been withheld because they are considered juveniles under Virginia law.

But Loudoun County Supervisor Caleb Kershner, who is an attorney whose law firm represented the 15-year-old boy when his case came before a juvenile court judge last year and in January of this year, has demanded that the report be released.

He told WTOP News that in an upcoming joint meeting in February of the Board of Supervisors and the Loudoun County School Board, he would raise the issue of withholding school funding unless school officials release the report. 

“Loudoun County Public Schools needs to keep our students safe, and parents need assurances that the mistake made by the LCPS and by the Commonwealth’s Attorney will never occur again,” he told WTOP. He was referring to concerns raised that the Commonwealth’s Attorney, who serves as the county prosecutor, also mishandled the case involving the teenager.

“The Board of Supervisors will be starting our budget process with LCPS this month, and I will be asking LCPS to release their independent sexual assault report as a condition of funding,” WTOP quoted him as saying.

In a little-noticed article last November, the British publication DailyMail.com published an interview with the 15-year-old boy’s mother, who said her son identifies as heterosexual and as a male, not as gender fluid or transgender.

LGBTQ activists have said the backlash against both the Virginia and Loudoun County transgender non-discrimination policies was fueled by what they have said all along was unsubstantiated claims that the boy was transgender or gender fluid.

His mother told DailyMail.com that her son occasionally wore a skirt “because it gave him attention he desperately needed and sought,” but he wore jeans and male clothes most of the time. She pointed out that law enforcement authorities disclosed that her son and the girl he was charged with assaulting in the school’s girl’s bathroom had consenting sex in the bathroom twice before the alleged assault.

Kershner’s call for the release of the school report on the two sexual assault incidents came three days before Loudoun County Juvenile Court Chief Judge Pamela Brooks reversed an earlier decision to place the 15-year-old boy on the Virginia sex offender registry for life.

WTOP News reports that the judge’s reversal of her earlier order placing the boy on the sex offender registry came in response to arguments by Kershner and members of Kirshner’s own law firm representing the boy at a Jan. 27 hearing. The lawyers argued that a sex offender registry designation should be limited to adults rather than a juvenile and would be harmful to the juvenile justice system’s objective of rehabilitation for juvenile offenders.

Brooks left in place her earlier decision on Jan. 12 to sentence the boy to supervised probation in a locked juvenile rehabilitation center until his 18th birthday, WTOP News reported.