An assistant superintendent at Albemarle County Public Schools has been placed on leave amid accusations of sexual harassment against female employees and the head of a volunteer school advocacy group.
Patrick McLaughlin, who heads up strategic planning for the school division, apparently found an online photo of Heidi Gilman Bennet, the outgoing president of the Family Council, an all-volunteer, nonpartisan advocacy group, from her days on the dance team at Stanford University, where she earned a degree in linguistics and education.
According to an ACPS employee, McLaughlin took to displaying the photo of Bennet during work meetings on a 60-inch TV screen, and at least once made the comment, “There’s our Family Council president, hard at work dancing,” and according to Bennet, in a Substack post on the matter, “make inappropriate comment about the TYPE of dancing.”
Considering the nature of the photo, which is about as harmless and benign as it can be – Bennet noted in a caption she wrote for the photo on her blog that it depicted her “looking adorable & wholesome” – something weird was going on here, clearly.
Per a complaint filed with the EEOC from an unnamed female ACPS employee, what was going on was McLaughlin creating “a culture of fear where threats and intimidation directed at women and minoritized parties is used to silence.”
“As an attendee at the meeting observing (the) display, my fear was that my picture would be projected for the purposes of embarrassment,” the employee wrote in the EEOC complaint. “I also interpreted this as a macroaggression against women intended to serve as a warning about what could happen to me if I were outspoken or challenged the status quo.”
Bennet spoke about the issue at an Albemarle County School Board meeting earlier this month, in which she speculated that she was made the object of McLaughlin’s attention in meetings because of her advocacy work, wondering aloud if his aim was “to retaliate against me for my data analysis of reading scores that led to the Bellwether audit” or “to humiliate me because I dared share families’ concerns about his pet Career Learning Community project.”
“When ACPS leaders look the other way when Pat McLaughlin repeatedly mocks a parent & advisory committee leader, it creates a weirdly sexualized environment which numbs staff to the damage of sexual misbehavior. It creates a culture of fear where employees do not feel safe reporting concerns, where HR ‘passes the trash,’ and ultimately where students may be seriously harmed by sexual predators in our schools,” Bennet told the School Board, per her Substack post.
If that’s not striking a nerve, there is no such thing – that comment there coming on the heels of Albemarle County Schools Superintendent Matt Haas resigning, under pressure, last month, as the school division has been rocked by the arrests of a fifth-grade teacher on child porn charges and an elementary school counselor on sexual battery charges.
Michael J. Swiney, 37, of Buckingham, who was a social and emotional learning coach at Hollymead Elementary School, has been charged with 11 felonies after a months-long investigation into allegations of sex crimes involving children.
The allegations are stunning: Swiney faces seven felony counts of aggravated sexual battery, three felony counts of indecent liberties, and one felony count of attempted aggravated sexual battery.
Nicholas J. Clark, 29, of Charlottesville, who was a fifth-grade teacher at Woodbrook, was arrested in March on two felony charges of possessing and distributing child pornography.
“This alleged behavior of Pat McLaughlin certainly seems like a fireable offense?” Bennet wrote in her Substack post. “No parent should be subjected to attempted sexualized humiliation by an ACPS employee or assistant superintendent. The culture of ACPS must change.”
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Chris Graham
