Aaron Spence slipped into the back of a classroom, hoping to go unnoticed. With his 6-foot-4 frame, that isn’t always simple. A teacher’s eyes quickly darted over to acknowledge his presence and then, without skipping a beat, continued on with a lesson about how to be a good leader.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Spence quipped quietly to himself.
Spence has made similarly quiet visits across the Loudoun County public school district since starting as its superintendent in September. He’s on a listening tour of the wealthy Northern Virginia school system just outside Washington — the third-largest in the state — that has been thrust into multiple controversies in recent years over its handling of sexual assaults at two high schools and fiery fights over school masking, equity plans and pronouns. His predecessor was fired and criminally charged after a probe of the sex assaults.
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Spence says he was well aware of the challenges when he agreed to take the job. He also knew the county wanted to fix its problems. In surveys, parents and school staff repeatedly said they were looking for a superintendent who could restore the relationship between the community and school district. Nearly every school board candidate campaigned this fall on rebuilding trust and transparency, and voters elected a new board in November, ousting the only two incumbents in the race — a sign that the community was eager to leave the controversy in the past. Spence sees attempting to rebuild a divided community like Loudoun as important not just to restore trust in the district, but also to help dismantle broader attacks on public education.
Just weeks into his tenure, Spence quickly learned how sensitive the situation was, publicly squabbling with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and Loudoun’s sheriff over his response to recent overdoses at a high school in the county. The elected leaders said Spence wasn’t being transparent enough with families about what happened; the superintendent countered he was trying to protect student privacy.
To some extent, the dynamic in Loudoun is similar to the intense scrutiny — often politics-driven — that other school districts across America have faced in recent years. Spence says he learned to manage this scrutiny as schools superintendent in Virginia Beach, the fourth-largest school district in the state. He hoped an experienced superintendent, like himself, might help Loudoun rebuild.
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“I’m worried that public schools won’t exist if we don’t get our communities back behind our schools,” Spence said. “America needs public schools.”
That trust for Spence starts with listening and learning — seeing his schools in action. So on a Tuesday in November, as Spence stood in the back of the dark classroom, he unfolded a pair of eyeglasses so he could get a better look at the presentation on leadership. He took out his phone and snapped a photo of the slide about leadership traits and saved it for later.
Looking for transparency
For years, Loudoun County had been a relatively small farming community. Most of the population was concentrated around Leesburg before more families began flocking to the county in the 1990s. The east side of the county began to boom, and the school population grew with it, making it one of fastest-growing school districts in the state. It now has more than 80,000 students and 98 schools. With the growth, the demographics of the county also began to change, as did the politics. In 2012, six of the nine school board members were endorsed by the Loudoun County Republican Committee. No members were backed by the Democratic Party, according to Washington Post archives.
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In 2014, Edgar Hatrick, who’d spent more than two decades at the helm of the Loudoun district, retired as superintendent and was replaced by newcomer Eric Williams. Then in 2019, a wave of almost entirely new — and Democratic-endorsed — members were elected to the school board.
The board faced several challenges. Pandemic shutdowns left parents outraged over school closures and masking decisions. Meanwhile, two damning reports found that widespread racism in Loudoun was stunting the progress of Black and Hispanic students. The school system attempted to address the disparities through equity plans, but some parents alleged teachers were instructing White children to feel ashamed of their race.
Williams announced he was leaving in 2020 and was replaced by Scott Ziegler in 2021. That year, a teacher sued the school system after he was suspended for refusing to use transgender students’ pronouns. School board members faced online threats and recall petitions. One member resigned as a result. An infamous school board meeting ended in an arrest and began a years-long controversy over the district’s handling of two high-profile sexual assaults that were committed by one student at two different schools.
At the time, Youngkin was running for governor and tapped into the strife he heard from parents in the district. He campaigned on restoring “parents’ rights” and vowed to ban critical race theory and to investigate the Loudoun sexual assaults. The state’s new attorney general empaneled a special grand jury to investigate the assaults. In a 91-page report, the jury found that there was no coordinated coverup of the assaults but it faulted Loudoun schools and public safety officials for deeply mismanaging the situation. After the report’s release, the Loudoun school board fired Ziegler in December 2022, and he was later indicted on a charge connected to the case. Virginia’s attorney general recently asked a judge to drop that charge, though Ziegler was convicted of a misdemeanor in another incident.
When it came time to look for a new schools chief, words like “transparency” and “trust” frequently came up in meetings and in the more-than-4,100 survey responses the school board received during the search. Parents said the new superintendent “should possess the experience to deal with the vocal minority and get the system back on track.” Students said trust between parents, the board and the schools needed to be rebuilt. Community groups wanted to see less bad press and a superintendent who understands the politics of the division.
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“Passionate parents can be challenging as they expect accountability,” the report read.
Before Loudoun
Long before he became a superintendent, Spence wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, a civil engineer in the Navy. At the University of Virginia, however, he quickly realized that he didn’t enjoy math and science nearly as much as he thought and instead pivoted to French. He saw two career paths: working for the State Department or teaching.
He started as a French teacher and then, looking to impact a larger swath of students, began climbing the ranks as an administrator. He moved from an assistant principal to a principal. He worked in administrative roles for Houston Independent School District before landing his first superintendency in North Carolina. He spent two years there before moving back in 2014 to Virginia Beach, his hometown, to lead the school division.
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Beverly Anderson, a longtime school board member who helped select Spence for that role, recalled that she could tell he had a strong educational background and cared deeply about educators. Anderson lauded Spence’s achievements in Virginia Beach — like moving every elementary school to offer full-day kindergarten and innovating the district’s professional development offerings.
When Spence came to the district, Virginia Beach had 16 schools that were not fully accredited, which is Virginia’s way of evaluating schools on factors like test scores and college and career readiness. Spence worked on funneling more targeted resources to those schools. Progress was made and, by fall 2017, every school in the district was fully accredited.
“I can tell you that, in my 36 years as a teacher, and in my time on the school board, he’s been, as far as I was concerned, he was the best superintendent we’ve ever had in Virginia Beach,” Anderson said.
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But the district also struggled at times. Spence and the Virginia Beach school board were criticized for creating a “Fair and Equitable Grading Practices Committee” that considered approaches like minimizing low scores and reducing penalties for late work. In 2019, Spence publicly feuded with the school board when he filed a complaint accusing some members of creating a “hostile work environment.” The Virginian-Pilot reported that the board members had voted against renewing his contract and were posting on social media about Spence’s performance.
Then, in January 2020, Spence’s wife shared a photo on Facebook with the caption: “Happy New Year to all! I hope this year is a wonderful one filled with love and happiness for everyone … except for Trump; he can go and f--- himself.” The post sparked outrage, and the Spences quickly issued apologies.
“As the Superintendent of Virginia Beach City Public Schools, I want to be clear about where I stand,” Aaron Spence wrote in a statement at the time. “While I defend my wife’s right to free speech and self-expression, it’s important to state that I don’t condone this type of language. I understand that I must serve as a role model for the students and teachers in our division and for our community as a whole and that I am judged not only by my own conduct but also by the conduct of those around me.”
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Some Virginia Beach school board members said Spence was always careful when he navigated the challenges. They spoke highly of his professional approach, as well as his willingness to listen and desire to prioritize students.
“I can’t be political in my job,” Spence said. “My politics are children, and I have to try to help our board do what’s right for kids and minimize what is becoming, in a lot of ways, the polarized nature of school boards.”
A new challenge
The Loudoun school board approved Spence’s selection as the system’s superintendent in June after a national recruiting firm spent six months searching for a new leader. Spence signed a contract with a $375,000 annual salary, ready for the next challenge of his career.
Mort Sherman, senior associate executive director of the School Superintendents Association, knew Spence from his work training and mentoring other superintendents. Sherman, who lives in Leesburg and whose daughter is a Loudoun public school teacher, knew the district needed a strong leader who could refocus it on children and educators. He said he immediately thought of Spence’s steadfast and centered approach. He suggested that Spence consider the job.
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“They needed somebody who could just say, ‘Enough, we need to focus on what’s important,’” Sherman said. “And I think Aaron does that. He reminds us all the time about what’s important.”
Spence came in with an entry plan on how to transition into the district and find ways to “engage, empower and enrich” students, staff and the community. Part of that plan includes listening sessions to hear priorities, concerns and strengths — and touring every school in the district.
But the first months of the job have already come with challenges. In late October, the Loudoun sheriff notified Spence that nine students, all from the same high school, had overdosed over two weeks. None were fatal. Most seemed to be connected to fentanyl, the deadly drug proliferating in schools across the country.
In an interview, Spence said he immediately scheduled a meeting between the sheriff’s office and school leaders the next day, a Friday. The school district planned to send a message to the school community the following Tuesday. But Sheriff Mike Chapman thought the message, which did not specifically mention the string of overdoses, failed to sufficiently warn parents about the issue. The sheriff’s office crafted its own news release, released on the same day as the district’s, and Chapman later criticized the district’s response.
“When you have that many overdoses associated with a school, you’d think they would be specific in putting that information in,” Chapman said in an interview at the time. “They left that information out.”
The debate prompted Youngkin to issue an executive order in November that requires school districts to notify families of overdoses that happen in the school community within 24 hours, specifically citing Loudoun’s delays in notification. The following week, Spence hosted listening sessions where parents also voiced concerns about the notification process.
In an interview, Spence said that he was confused and somewhat frustrated by the uproar. The overdoses at Park View High were not the first the school system had seen. More than 20 minors have overdosed this year according to data from the sheriff’s office. He asked why there wasn’t more demand to know about overdoses in the spring when the system was hosting workshops and trainings with the sheriff’s office.
“Why was nobody saying, ‘Why aren’t you reporting about these when they’re happening’ then? Because that would have been very helpful for me,” Spence said, “I would have known coming in that’s an issue, and I could have dealt with that. It just never came up.”
Spence said he stands by his initial concerns about student privacy. He worries that sharing too many details could accidentally identify a student who overdosed. But the district is now complying with the new notification best practices issued by the Virginia education department under Youngkin’s executive order.
“The regret that I have is that our community feels that somehow the school division doesn’t want to be transparent, because it is my greatest aspiration,” Spence said.
Spence’s leadership has also been tested in other ways. At the end of November, more than a dozen students and parents voiced concerns at a school board meeting about an email Spence sent acknowledging pro-Palestinian high school walkouts after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. Spence’s email said the walkouts were peaceful, but noted that the division was aware of language used at some of the protests that it said could be interpreted as antisemitic.
Speakers at the school board meeting said the email made them feel targeted and that they worried about retaliation for participating in protests. Loudoun schools staff soon met with parents and students to discuss how the district could resolve the issue and be more thoughtful in communications going forward.
Rasha Saad, a mother of two Loudoun students, was one of the parents who met with district staff. Saad said she has been impressed by Spence’s leadership so far. “It’s gratifying to know, as a district, that when we report things, it’ll be heard or acted on, and they’ll make it right,” Saad said.
Other parents and teachers in the community say they are optimistic — but cautiously — about Spence’s leadership. Sandy Sullivan, president of the Loudoun Education Association, said Spence attended a teacher’s union meeting in October with educators who were ready for a change.
“I felt like he really was genuinely listening and hearing what people were saying and responding to it, even if it was something maybe I had a sense that he might not tackle it,” Sullivan said. “It certainly validated people’s feelings, and I’m not sure educators have felt that validated in many areas for a while.”
The listening sessions are a good start, Sullivan said, but it’s still early to see what Spence actually delivers on. And she’s especially skeptical that there will be significant progress made in his first year.
As he tours schools, Spence makes a point to engage with students every chance he gets. In the gymnasium at Arcola Elementary School, he bent over to hike rubber chickens with students in a chicken toss. He cheered on students parading decorated balloons down the hallway. He also made a point to stop every teacher he passed in the hallway, thanking them profusely for their work.
Because building relationships with the people you serve, he said, is one of the most important traits of a good leader.
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