Sex work by middle schoolers!?

The Daily Wire has developed an astonishing story that began with a boast that several middle-school students do sex work. This story, that began in one district, continued with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to another district. If preliminary findings are accurate, a newly elected governor has a much tougher job than he thought.

A warning to parents: this story treats a highly sensitive subject, probably as sensitive as it gets. So you might not want to let your under-18 children read this report. This warning extends to the featured and embedded video that accompanies this report.

The librarian boasted of the sex work

Our story begins in Loudoun County, Virginia, and a school called Sterling Middle School. Regular readers will recall the dust-ups in Loudoun County that arguably led to a flip of Virginia in its Pre-Midterm. According to The Daily Wire, a parent heard of a book titled Seeing Gender in the school library. You can guess the subject matter. But one page in particular drew this parent’s eye – and provoked her ire. It described sex work as a job like any other, in which one offers oneself in trade for things of value.

Seeing the above tweet, a teacher – who prefers to withhold her name – confronted the school librarian, one Stefany Guido. That conversation did not go well. According to this teacher:

She started talking about how there’s kids who come to the library who do sex work, and this makes them feel validated.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! Nor did the conversation end there, or get better – it got worse. After that, the teacher went straight to the sheriff’s office. Why? Because, as she reminded The Daily Wire:

As a teacher, if you get an individual student coming to you because you’re abused, you have to go the police immediately.

Which is what she did in this case. And again according to The Daily Wire:

Deputy Jamie Holben — a former School Resource Officer for the middle school— notes that the school is in a rough neighborhood where detectives have reason to believe child trafficking has occurred.

How many lesson plans in another district?

Luke Rosiak of The Daily Wire didn’t stop there. He next sent at least one Freedom of Information Act request to Richmond Public Schools. Whether he sent similar FOIA requests to other districts, he didn’t say. But in the City of Richmond he seems to have struck a ghastly motherlode.

Richmond Public Schools’ media office said that they might have as many as four thousand “records.” Mr. Rosiak was asking for lesson plans, emails, and communications among staff using the phrase “sex work” or “sex worker.” The office then demanded payment of about twenty thousand dollars up-front to search for and retrieve all those records.

This article came on on June 2. Austin Hamblen then wrote it up in Shaun Kenney’s newsletter, “The Republican Standard,” on June 11.

In Virginia, cities above a certain size are independent of any counties. The City of Richmond, in fact, lies between Henrico and Chesterfield Counties, so that no county surrounds it.

The Governor’s challenge

Governor Glenn Youngkin swept into office on a wave of parental outrage last year. This led many Democrats to cry out in terror that Republicans had become the Party of Parents.

Does Governor Youngkin know the half of what is going on in Virginia schools? He might not. He won election after his opponent boasted that parents had no voice in school curriculum. In those days the most outrageous incidents involved student-on-student sexual crime. But not a single rumor of high- or middle-school students doing sex work surfaced during that campaign. So Luke Rosiak might have discovered something new, or at least unknown until now.

Politically active groups like the Mechanicsville Tea Party always knew about questionable books in school libraries. They even have dealt with librarians who defend works like Seeing Gender in a “spirit of academic freedom.” (Or perhaps they shut down debate by referring to Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451.) But even they never mentioned a librarian openly boasting of knowing students in the sex work trade. And why does no one discuss this, even while they get up in arms (and rightly so) about someone bursting into a school and shooting pupils and teachers?

One can argue that some injuries to a child’s soul might be worse than a life-ending bullet. Drafting or enticing a child into sex work is surely one of these.