National Review has a story today about a battle that has been taking place at a Pennsylvania Middle School since last year. There’s a lot to this one so settle in. First, let’s set the table by talking about the student walkout and protests that took place last May. This is from a very sympathetic local news report published last May under the headline “String of Central Bucks School District decisions lead LGBTQ students and faculty to fear for civil rights.”

On Friday, May 6, Lenape Middle School teacher Andrew Burgess, who is seen as an ally to LGBTQ students in the district, was placed on a leave of absence. The reason for that decision remains unclear. Amid other recent actions in the district, some parents and students question if the motive is related to his support for LGBTQ students.

The suspension, according to Lenape students, came after Burgess supplied one parent of an LGBTQ student with the contact information for the U.S. Department Office of Civil Rights when the student was being bullied over their identity.

The suspension of this teacher led to a school walkout, days of protests and some comments from the ACLU.

A 🧵on Central Bucks School District (I never left): Lenape Middle School students and parents are protesting sudden changes that seem to target the LGBTQ+ community.

ACLU Pa. says it's hard not to conclude that the pattern in CBSD is a "systemic assault" on LGBTQ+ students. pic.twitter.com/Hx5VexKxRX

— Emily Rizzo (@EmilyKRizzo) May 11, 2022

Another student group just formed in Central Bucks West High School, called "West Rise Up." There's a new student group in Pennridge School District (facing similar issues), too, called "Pennridge Rise Up."

Student resistance is growing. pic.twitter.com/GnLr36jqLB

— Emily Rizzo (@EmilyKRizzo) May 11, 2022

“Student resistance is growing.” Okay, but that looks like fewer than 10 people. Anyway, there were allegations that trans kids specifically were being bullied and mistreated. A teacher sympathetic to them named Anthony Burgess was suspended, allegedly for filing a complaint with the Department of Education about the issue. In short, people were very much trying to make this into a federal case. And they succeeded in that as the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights eventually opened four separate investigations.

But NR reports today that a separate investigation by a law firm hired by the school district found that some of the people involved in the situation had other motivations and couldn’t back up some of the broad claims they made about the school.

A detailed and damning new investigative report released Thursday evening reveals that the narrative from the ACLU and Central Bucks activists is based on lies, and that they have intentionally painted a false picture to undermine the school board. The investigation, sanctioned by the board, was conducted by Philadelphia-based law firm, Duane Morris.

According to the firm’s report, there is no epidemic of LGBTQ bullying in Central Bucks or at Lenape Middle School, and when there are accusations of bullying, the district’s leaders promptly address them. The report states that Burgess was not, in fact, disciplined for filing a complaint on behalf of a trans student, but rather for manipulating vulnerable students, and for intentionally hiding serious bullying allegations from school leaders.

That’s the overview but there’s a lot more detail to this which the report explains very clearly, starting with this teacher’s connection to a bullied student.

In the spring of 2022, Mr. Burgess failed to report allegations by Student 1, who was then a student at Lenape Middle School, that Student 1 had been physically assaulted, threatened, and subjected to a variety of slurs. Instead, Mr. Burgess directed Student 1 to report these allegations only to him, and not to others in the School District, including guidance counselors or administrators. Mr. Burgess convinced Student 1 that guidance counselors and administrators at Lenape would not help Student 1, and that only he would help Student 1. On or about March 3, 2022, Mr. Burgess created a four-page dossier, cataloguing, in graphic detail, the alleged physical assaults, slurs, and threats Student 1 had reported to him. According to the dossier, this alleged harassment of Student 1 occurred over the course of months during late 2021 and early 2022, was perpetrated by about a dozen of Student 1’s fellow Lenape students, and some of it was ongoing, supposedly occurring multiple times a week.

Rather than reporting this alleged harassment of Student 1 to the principal of Lenape Middle School, as he was required to do, Mr. Burgess actively concealed it from the School District administration. He used the information in the dossier to file a complaint with OCR in the spring of 2022, purportedly on Student 1’s behalf. During an interview under oath, conducted as part of this investigation, Mr. Burgess told us that he provided a copy of the dossier to Zachary J. Marshall, an attorney at OCR’s Philadelphia Office. Mr. Burgess also told us that he informed Mr. Marshall that he had concealed the dossier and the allegations contained in it from the School District administration.

The report claims Burgess had a specific reason for doing all of this: He was upset about recent school board elections which put GOP candidates in charge. He wanted to block policies the new board was putting in place.

Based on our investigation, we have concluded that Mr. Burgess had an ulterior motive for taking these actions. In December 2021, a newly elected six-to three Republican majority on the School Board took office, following the November 2021 Municipal Election. Shortly after this new School Board was inaugurated, the Board began considering the adoption of policies—including ones concerning the age-appropriateness of library books and classroom materials—with which Mr. Burgess disagreed. In addition to being a Lenape teacher, Mr. Burgess was also a Vice President of the Central Bucks Education Association, the labor union representing teachers in the District. To express his disapproval of the new policies, Mr. Burgess used his union position to attempt to interfere with communications between Geanine Saullo, the principal at Lenape, and teachers at Lenape regarding the appropriateness of certain books in their classroom libraries.

Mr. Burgess’s initial efforts to derail policies that he disliked could only do so much. Mrs. Saullo was able to communicate with the teaching staff, and the Board, having considered the issue, adopted policies on the age-appropriateness of library and classroom materials, including ones prohibiting visual depictions of sex acts, with final approval in the summer of 2022. Also during this time period, the School District considered, adopted, or formalized other policies, including those requiring parent or guardian consent for student name or gender pronoun changes and prohibiting teachers from engaging in advocacy activities in their classrooms.

The evidence and circumstances suggest that Mr. Burgess believed that, if he brought to light supposed widespread unaddressed bullying and harassment of LGBTQ students and convinced a federal agency to investigate such matters, the School Board would cave to the inevitable criticism and bad press—particularly if Mr. Burgess, aided by the press, could convince the public that the School District’s new policies were the actual cause of such bullying and harassment.

Here’s the big payoff. Burgess was interviewed for the report and was asked to point out a single instance of bullying in his school or any other school in the district other than the allegations made by Student 1. He couldn’t do it.

There was a flaw in this plan, however: there was no such epidemic of anti-LGBTQ bullying and harassment at Lenape Middle School or in District schools more generally. During his interview under oath as part of this investigation, Mr. Burgess could not identify a single instance of reported and unaddressed bullying, discrimination, or harassment of an LGBTQ student anywhere in the School District at any time. This was a consistent refrain during our investigation, where witness after witness told us that they were unaware of any specific instances of reported and unaddressed bullying or harassment of LGBTQ students. Furthermore, during his interview, Mr. Burgess confirmed that he could not say one  way or the other whether a hostile environment presently existed at any of the District’s 23 schools.

Burgess was suspended not because he’d filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights but because the school’s principal, Geanine Saullo, learned he’d told Student 1 not to report any of the bullying to anyone else at the school, something Burgess was required to report. Nevertheless, the protesters spread the idea that Burgess had been suspended for sticking up for a bullied student rather than hiding the bullying from the school. That’s the story that was repeated by left-wing commentators.

The walk-outs drew Lenape into the national spotlight, with Steve Silberman, a writer for Wired magazine, accusing Mrs. Saullo of “terrorizing kids who stood up for a teacher that defended an #LGBTQ+ student against bullying.” Keith Olbermann, another well-known national commentator, wrote on Twitter of Mrs. Saullo: “LET’S END HER CAREER.”

Here’s Olbermann’s misleading tweet about the situation:

1) A transgender student is bullied at a suburban Philly school
2) Teacher helps kid
3) Teacher is suspended
4) Students help teacher
5) Principal Geanine Saullo of @CBLenapeMS caught on tape, threatening to call cops on kids
6) LET'S END HER CAREER.
https://t.co/LT2iw9aCR0

— Keith Olbermann↙️ (@KeithOlbermann) May 12, 2022

Naturally, this version of events made people angry and some of them lashed out at the principal.

As a result, Mrs. Saullo—a dedicated public school administrator since 1999 whose teaching experience goes back to 1993 after her graduation from the Pennsylvania State University—has been the recipient of hate mail, vicious voicemail messages, and death threats stemming from the protests. One such death threat, posted by a Lenape student to an Instagram thread related to the protests,
read: “rip Mrs. Saullo she done for.”

And that’s still just the beginning of this. Because after the initial OCR complaint filed by Burgess on behalf of Student 1 was rejected, he filed another one complaining his suspension was retaliation for the filing of the first complaint. The law firm report found that the school wasn’t even aware of the first OCR complaint when it suspended him. In any case, Burgess’ claim of retaliation also got a boost from a Democrat on the school board.

We discovered that shortly before OCR rejected Mr. Burgess’s complaint about Student 1 but opened the “retaliation” investigation, a member of the Central Bucks Board of School Directors, Karen Smith, wrote an e-mail message directed to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and OCR Head Catherine Lhamon. In her e-mail, Ms. Smith complained that she had been outvoted by the Board’s Republican majority on several policy issues that she claimed affected LGBTQ students. Ms. Smith is one of three Democrats on the nine-member School Board. Ms. Smith falsely stated that the School District had “suspend[ed] an exemplary teacher for protecting a transgender student.” She further urged OCR to join in her “fight[]” against the Board’s Republican majority.

Having received Ms. Smith’s e-mail, OCR—headed by Ms. Lhamon, a political appointee of the current Presidential Administration—launched four separate federal investigations against the School District.

So it sort of looks as if the Biden DOE was responding to a political plea from a Democrat on the school board. There’s much more to this story (the full report is 147 pages long) but that’s a start. The ACLU, which I mentioned in passing above, has called the report a “sham” and “problematic.” So we’re probably going to see this story continue for quite a while longer.

The @cbsdschools has released its sham investigation into our complaint that the district has created a hostile environment for LGBTQ+ students. This so-called investigation is problematic for many reasons. 🧵 1/7

— ACLU of Pennsylvania (@aclupa) April 21, 2023