Fairfax County Public Schools is being criminally investigated after a school social worker was accused of taking underage students for abortions without parental knowledge or consent — and a whistleblower has recordings showing that district officials knew and did nothing.
It’s another election year in Virginia and yet another woke school district has been caught undermining parental rights, hiding critical student information, and covering it all up.
Last week, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R, who was swept into office in 2021 after Loudoun County School officials went to extreme lengths to hide the rape of a 14-year-old girl by a “skirt-wearing” boy in a girls’ bathroom, directed the Virginia State Police to open a full criminal investigation into nearby Fairfax County Public Schools after it came to light that school officials allegedly overlooked the actions of a school social worker who arranged for students to get abortions without parental notification and consent.
This comes after a whistleblower teacher turned over a trove of video recordings, emails, and other hard evidence on the illegal abortions and her communications with FCPS staff over the course of several years, while two of the students involved provided personal statements backing up those charges.
Youngkin called the allegations “shocking” in an interview with DC News Now and later said in a speech in nearby Sterling, Virginia, “We’re gonna get to the bottom of this, and if the allegations are true, we’re gonna hold people accountable.”
In Virginia, the law requires all minors to have either a parent’s consent or judicial permission in order to obtain an abortion. In addition, FCPS policy is very clear that “Every effort shall be made to encourage and support students suspecting pregnancy to discuss their concern with their parents or guardians….In no case shall personnel commit themselves to maintain such information confidentially, keeping it from parents, guardians, or appropriate school authorities.”
“No Other Choice”
Reporting by the W.C. Dispatch, an independent conservative outlet, claims that two former Fairfax County students have accused Centreville High School social worker Carolina Díaz of scheduling appointments at a nearby clinic for them to receive abortions, to be paid for by Díaz, allegedly with school funds. She successfully facilitated one abortion for a 17-year-old student without informing her parents.
That girl, who is from Guatemala, issued a handwritten statement in November 2022 alleging that Díaz had scheduled the abortion in November 2021. Her statement, translated from Spanish, says that Díaz “scheduled the appointment for me”; “paid the costs of the medical procedure”; and “kept everything quiet without informing my family.”
The other student, also a minor at the time, said that Díaz scheduled an appointment for her to receive an abortion when she was five months pregnant — not only without informing her parents but against the student’s will. The student did not want to have an abortion but claims the social worker told her that she “had no other choice.”
The girl ran out of her appointment before the procedure and has kept her baby.
She later told Zenaida Perez, an English as a Second Language (ESOL) teacher at Centreville High School, about Diaz’s actions. Perez then provided a recording to the WC Dispatch in which the girl’s family said that no one at the school had ever informed them of the attempt to force their daughter to get an abortion.
A Denial Already Disproven?
On August 7, after the allegations were released in the media, FCPS superintendent Michelle Reid sent a statement to parents saying that the district had just learned about the allegations that week. She wrote:
“I want to stress that at no time, would the situation as described in these allegations be acceptable in Fairfax County Public Schools.
We all have serious questions about these allegations that must be answered. We all deserve to know what happened, and at my direction, the division has taken immediate action to engage an external independent investigator to get all the facts. We will see this investigation through with the utmost seriousness, taking swift and appropriate action once we have the facts. It is my commitment to share the key findings of that investigation as soon as I am able.”
When asked if the district had ever scheduled abortions for students, FCPS responded, “Not to [our] knowledge. We have launched an immediate investigation into these concerns as soon as we were made aware.”
But Perez claims that FCPS has been engaged in a coverup that has gone on for years, and she has plenty of receipts backing up her accusation.
Perez told Mary McGowan, a retired lawyer from Blakingship & Keith, a firm FCPS had used in the past, that she had told officials about the allegations on seven different occasions, both in person and via email.
Perez said that after she learned of the allegations from the student, she met with then-principal Chad Lehman on May 5, 2022, a meeting that she recorded. She also wrote Lehman an email about the incident on May 13. Perez then met with Lehman again in November 2022. She provided Fox News with a recording of that meeting. Lehman said at the meeting that he didn’t believe the social worker would have facilitated the abortion.
On March 7 of this year, Perez told Heidi Siegmund, a lawyer with the law firm McGuireWoods, which was investigating a separate issue, about the allegations. On March 19, Siegmund wrote an email to Perez in which she said, “We will also make sure the Division Counsel’s office is aware of your concerns.”
According to WC Dispatch, Perez then met with FCPS investigator James Mackie on May 2 and told him of her allegations.
“God bless Zenaida for fighting through this,” stated Julie Perry, a fellow FCPS teacher, “What’s so sad are the higher-ups. They’re not concerned about the truth. They’re concerned about keeping silent about these abortions.”
A Pattern of Defiance and Secrecy
Of course, the amount of recorded and written evidence provided in this case is obviously strong enough to warrant a major investigation, but it also fits a pattern of behavior among highly progressive school officials in Northern Virginia. Fairfax County Public Schools — like nearby Loudoun County Schools and Arlington County Schools — has a long record of hiding important information from parents about students’ health, safety, and even academics.
For example, in July 2023, when the Virginia Department of Education issued model policies on issues regarding students who express confusion about their gender that directed districts to use a student’s given name and pronouns that align with the student’s sex, not their preferred gender, “defer” to parents on major decisions, and “collaborate” with parents on potential accommodations, FCPS chose to publicly defy those legal requirements.
As such, school officials continued hiding students’ gender confusion or social transition from parents and they continued to allow boys to compete in girls’ sports and use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. That stance may have made them feel virtuous among their progressive education friends, but it’s also now put them in a whole other level of trouble.
On August 8, the U.S. Department of Education charged FCPS and four other Northern Virginia school districts with openly violating Title IX by allowing males into female spaces and ignoring the complaints of female students, who told the feds that the FCPS policy resulted in all kinds of inappropriate and uncomfortable situations, including that boys claiming to be girls had engaged in unwanted touching and voyeurism as the real girls undressed. The district now stands to lose federal funding if it doesn’t rescind its radical gender policies and start following the law.
The problem is that FCPS, like so many school districts, is more loyal and responsive to the radical progressive agenda pushed by national teachers’ unions and progressive activists than they are to the needs and concerns of students and parents. Among other insane ideas, these groups believe that abortion-on-demand is not only necessary but empowering and that parents don’t have their children’s best interests at heart.
The Battle Over Children Continues
So, should anyone really be surprised that a school district like FCPS would facilitate an abortion for students without notifying their parents?
No, they shouldn’t — but they should be repulsed and outraged.
Schools have arrogantly usurped parents’ God-given authority and constitutional right to know about and direct their children’s health and well-being.
Why? Because progressive school officials believe they know better than parents.
In this situation, that arrogance led to the taxpayer-funded murder of a baby and sent the 17-year-old mother home to suffer alone.
Now this girl will spend the rest of her life living with the weight of the decision she made to kill her child at the behest of a school employee — a decision she made with no input or support from family members who care the most about her and who are the best suited to help her.
Such actions are inexcusable. Until a message is sent to school officials and employees that they cannot overrule and undermine parents these types of horrors will only continue.
Let us pray that this is finally the case that holds school officials fully — and criminally — accountable for their actions.
And let’s pray that parents (and other voters) recognize that the battle over who gets the ultimate say over children’s health and well-being will once again be on the ballot in Virginia this fall.
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