LEESBURG, Va.—Independent school board candidates are trying to carve out their niche in Fairfax and Loudoun counties. These two top Virginia school districts, with over 250,000 students combined, have also been under the national spotlight for fights over race- and gender-related school policies, with differing views overlapping with party lines.
As a result, though officially nonpartisan, most school board candidates in the two counties are politically endorsed. Out of a total of 43 candidates, the two independents, one in each county, are betting on the communities’ belief that school board positions should be free of party lines or that candidates endorsed by either party lack the credibility to focus on academics and academics only.
Lauren Shernoff, one such independent candidate for the Leesburg District, said she felt confident she would be elected while distributing her own “new leadership sample ballot” outside the Loudoun County Office of Elections in Leesburg on Nov. 4, the last day of in-person early voting. Local candidates don’t have a “D” or “R” label next to the names on the ballot. Therefore, sample ballots are essential voting guides.
“I feel very good. We’re getting a good response,” Ms. Shernoff told The Epoch Times. “People are open to the message of coming together. And people feel like politics may not have the best place in our schools. So we are pressing into that.”
‘We Are Better Together’
Her opponent, incumbent Erika Ogedegbe, was endorsed by the Democratic Party.Ms. Ogedegbe is running for reelection on “equity and social justice,” according to her official website. She also criticizes “some people” on her site’s landing page for “actively working to take books off shelves, remove protections for marginalized and vulnerable students, and limit what is taught and discussed in our classrooms.”
Last year, she became a first-time school board member through a special election. During her campaign, she said she would support the release of the report regarding how the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) handled two sexual assaults in 2021. In May, a gender-fluid boy raped a teenage girl in a girl’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School. The boy was then transferred to a different high school and sexually assaulted another girl in October. The boy was eventually convicted and sentenced last year.
“Ultimately, to be fully transparent entire report would need to be released,” she said at the meeting, explaining her change of mind. “It is clear to me, after having read the report in detail, that the report was not intended to be shared,” she continued, citing that compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) would keep the report private. The Epoch Times has contacted Ms. Ogedegbe for comment.
Eventually, a judge unsealed a redacted version of the Blankingship & Keith report in September 2023. How the school authorities handled the sexual assaults during a time when the school board pushed for a policy using bathrooms and preferred pronouns according to students’ self-identified gender has created a big trust deficit in the community.
“We are hoping to start something new and start coming back together,” Ms. Shernoff said. “We are better together.”
Both Ms. Ogedegbe and Ms. Shernoff have educational experience. Ms. Ogedegbe has 20 years of experience in data and analytics in universities, and Ms. Shernoff taught in Fairfax County Public Schools for 10 years before moving to the neighboring Loudoun. She’s now teaching literacy in Loudoun.
Although the local Republican Party hasn’t endorsed Ms. Shernoff, it has put her as a “preferred candidate” on its sample ballot.
‘Education First’
Ahmed Hussein, the only independent school board candidate in Fairfax County, said he was aware of school board members’ challenges, including long evening meetings and pressure from a divided public.“I’ll be able to bridge the gap and focus on education rather than all these other nonsense topics that the school board has been spinning on,” he told The Epoch Times, defining education as the “academic curriculum.”
Being the independent, he is not on the Democratic and Republican sample ballots. Mr. Hussein spent hours passing out flyers and speaking to voters outside the Fairfax County Government Center on Nov. 4. He tried to chat with every passing by voter, whether the voter was holding a Republican or Democratic sample ballot.
Mr. Hussein said his two boys in FCPS motivated him to run; he wanted them to have a good education.
‘Triangle of Trust’
Like Ms. Shernoff, Joe Smith, a Republican-endorsed school board candidate for the Little River District in Loudoun County, also spent hours connecting to voters in Leesburg on Nov. 4.To him, the issue of parents or teachers making decisions on public education was a narrative.
“It’s not a question of banning books or the question of not trusting the teachers and specialists,” he told The Epoch Times, using the book controversy as an example. “It’s a matter of working together again, and we’ve lost that triangle of trust between teachers, parents, and students. We need to get back to that.”
The medical service business owner said people want changes and want to focus on academic excellence, adding that his several years of experience as a high school wrestling and softball coach provided him with unique insights into the needs of students and their families.
Bill McClure, a Democrat and a service worker in his 60s, agreed with the academic focus.
He is unhappy with the vocal Loudoun parents who spoke at the school board meetings about critical race theory, a quasi-Marxist framework that views America as systematically racist. He calls them “right-wing parents.”
However, he said he was also not happy with the progressives who were “a little ‘too woke’” in his view.
He’s a guardian of a 15-year-old boy in the 8th grade. “The school is pushing along pre-algebra when the boy cannot even count money,” he told The Epoch Times regarding his concerns on education as he arrived to vote early in Leesburg on Nov. 4.
