Loudoun parent Ian Prior tells DOJ panel his family was harassed after school board fights

A Loudoun County parent who led a 2021 campaign to recall school board members told a Justice Department roundtable this year that his family endured a yearlong campaign of harassment. He said a 2021 federal memo emboldened local activists against parents like him.

Ian Prior's remarks are part of the transcript of the June 11, 2026 roundtable, "Exposing Weaponization Against Parents in Schools." The transcript appears in a 273-page DOJ report released this week. The report, dated Oct. 5, examines former Attorney General Merrick Garland's Oct. 4, 2021 memorandum on threats against school officials, which Attorney General Pamela Bondi has since rescinded. Prior's account is his own, and the report does not independently verify it.

Prior said he worked at the Justice Department as deputy director of public affairs during President Donald Trump's first term. He is now senior counsel at America First Legal. He said his family moved to Loudoun County with two young daughters while he worked at DOJ, expecting "better schools."

Prior said his concerns began in summer 2020, when he read that Loudoun County Public Schools was using curriculum from the Southern Poverty Law Center. He said he then concluded the school system was "essentially engaging in race-based admissions" to a new magnet school. He wrote an article in The Federalist and spoke at a board meeting about the First Amendment.

In March 2021, Prior said, a Facebook group called the "Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County" set out "to find all the parents that opposed school closure and mask policies" and policies related to critical race theory and equity. According to Prior, the group's goals were to "expose those parents, send mailers to those parents' neighborhoods, hack their platforms, infiltrate their groups." He said six school board members were part of the group, as was then-Commonwealth's Attorney Buta Biberaj.

In response, Prior said, he founded Fight for Schools, which collected signatures to remove six board members under state removal laws. "Over the course of that summer, we gathered 25,000 signatures," he said. He said he became a frequent media critic of the school system and "enemy number one" of the board in 2021. He said a list existed on which former Attorney General Jason Miyares ranked fifth.

Prior said the harassment intensified after the National School Boards Association's Sept. 29, 2021 letter and Garland's memo. In his view, the memo "gave a green light, a permission slip to these activists in the community that worked with the school boards." He said his family was subjected to "a yearlong online defamation campaign." He described hate mail sent to his home calling him "a cancer to the community" and a box of coal delivered to his door, which he said his daughters opened on Christmas Eve. He also described mail sent to neighbors calling him "a racist and white supremacist." Prior said the wires of his electronic dog fence were switched so it would no longer work, putting his dogs and children at risk.

Prior said the harassment continued until Biberaj lost office, and that it has stopped since Trump returned to office. "This is why parents are afraid to go out and speak," he said. "It doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter where you've worked... they will target you."

The DOJ report quotes Prior's account of hate mail and the coal delivery in its conclusion, without naming him. It cites the account as an example of how the Garland memo "exacerbated and encouraged attempts to chill" parents' speech.

During the question period, White House aide Vince Haley asked Prior whether "the fever has broken." Prior said activists had "gradually started to peel away" after actions by federal agencies and by Youngkin's and Miyares' offices. He described "a detente, so to speak," but said they were "probably underground somewhere." Panel moderator Sam Sorbo replied that the problem is "ongoing across the United States."

Former Gov. Glenn Youngkin, also on the panel, said stories like Prior's discourage people from running for school board. When people hear such accounts, he said, "they decide it's better off to keep your head down."

The report's findings are the working group's own and focus on how the Garland memo was produced inside DOJ. The report does not include responses from the Loudoun County School Board, Biberaj or members of the Facebook group Prior described.

Email the Loudoun County School Board:
April Chandler, april.chandler@lcps.org,
Anne Donohue, anne.donohue@lcps.org,
Deana Griffiths, deana.griffiths@lcps.org,
Ross Svenson, ross.stevenson@lcps.org,
Kari LaBell, kari.labell@lcps.org,
Jon Pepper, jonathon.pepper@lcps.org,
Lauren Shernoff, lauren.shernoff@lcps.org,
Sumera Rashid, sumera.rashid@lcps.org,
Amy Riccardi, amy.riccardi@lcps.org,

Loudoun County is a county in Northern Virginia. Its county seat is Leesburg.