In new book, Ian Prior pulls back the curtain on the parental battle against corrupt Loudoun County Schools

Ground zero of the national parents’ rights movement is Loudoun County, Virginia, where attorney Ian Prior and other parents fought an uphill battle against a corrupt school board and superintendent.

Prior’s new book, “Parents of the World, Unite! How to Save Our Schools from the Left’s Radical Agenda,” gives his firsthand account of “how people came together” to “shine a light of accountability on our public school system.”

Prior, senior advisor at America First Legal, hopes his story can be a blueprint for parents everywhere to fight for their schools and, most importantly, their children.

“Parents don’t want to tell schools how to teach academics,” Prior told The Lion. “But what they do want is schools to leave the social and moral issues to the parents. 

“What you’re seeing in schools now is that they are handling the moral issues, the social issues, in many cases against the parents’ wishes, against the parents’ beliefs, and they’re falling behind in actual academic instruction.”

The problems in Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) became national news when a purportedly transgender boy sexually assaulted a female student in the girl’s bathroom, followed by school officials sweeping the facts under the rug.

The crime was made possible in part by new gender-fluid bathroom rules opposed by many parents who were vocally protesting these and other progressive policies at school board meetings.

Prior’s book also details his investigation into the school district’s so-called equity training, uncovering how Critical Race Theory (CRT) principles cropped up in classrooms.

“It’s implicit in the things that they’re learning, that the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed, and it’s based on race and skin color and weight and sex and sexual orientation and ability and physical appearance and wealth and everything,” Prior explained.

“They are trying to divide people along these lines and get people to look at others based on these single stereotypical identities – which goes against everything that we have been working toward and progressing to for hundreds of years.”

But in Loudoun County, even CRT took a backseat when ostensibly pro-LGBT policies led to two female students being sexually assaulted. One incident occurred because the LCPS allowed boys who identified as girls to freely access the girl’s restroom.

“They’re instituting policies that are antithetical to basic science and biology,” Prior said.

By allowing boys into female locker rooms and on girls’ sports teams, “we teach children at public schools that biological sex is a fiction,” he added.

Even worse, left-leaning school boards do absolutely nothing to stop it.

“They’re being motivated by the base of their party and that’s obviously on the left,” Prior told The Lion. “They’re watching these community activists incessantly focus on issues like transgender policy, on systemic racism, on being ‘anti-racist,’ on equity, and they’re catering to those constituents and those constituents alone.

“And when everybody else says ‘I’m not quite comfortable with that policy,’ they then brand those people as bigots or racists or transphobes or whatever ‘ism’ that they can come up with.”

Even the father of the girl who was sexually assaulted in the bathroom by a skirt-wearing boy was arrested at a school board meeting when he spoke out.

That’s why Prior believes it is vital for parents to work together to fight the public school system.

“You can’t do it alone,” he said. “You need to find other parents and create a network of parents that can create a power dynamic against the school system and operate as a check and balance against the school system. Because right now there are no checks and balances.

“Schools are putting their own political agenda over student safety and student academics. When they do that, they will cut corners. They will violate the law. They will violate their own rules. Ultimately that’s where you’re going to get them.”

While the idea of taking on government-sponsored institutions is daunting, Prior believes that standing on the sidelines is no longer an option.

“When we’re talking about the education of children…you don’t get to do it all over again,” he said. “So, if you don’t get out there and fix things fast, you’re looking at a lost education for your child.”