Fairfax County Public Schools is denying allegations made by one of its teachers that a social worker employed by the school system facilitated student abortions.
Fairfax County Public Schools is denying allegations made by one of its teachers that a social worker employed by the school system facilitated student abortions, and said its investigation has determined the teacher fabricated the accusation, likely as retaliation against the social worker.
The Northern Virginia school district opened its investigation into the allegations after a teacher at Centreville High School went public with them in August. The teacher alleged that, in 2021, a social worker at Centreville encouraged and helped students get abortions without involving their parents.
That teacher also appears to have coerced students, or manipulated their statements, to support her allegations against the social worker, according to the school system’s initial investigation. Lawyers for the teacher called the school district’s probe “a thin coating of whitewash over very serious, detailed and documented charges,” in a statement to WTOP.
The teacher also said the school’s principal at the time, Chad Lehman, knew about the allegations and swept them under the rug. Promptly after the teacher went public in August, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin directed state police to launch an investigation. His office told WTOP that probe remains ongoing.
U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee, also sent a request to Fairfax County Public Schools requesting more information, as did the Department of Education.
In its response Friday to those two federal inquiries, the school district said its external investigation is ongoing, and that it had compiled its initial findings and conclusions to comply with Senate and Education Department deadlines for information, Oct. 17.
Americans United for Life, which describes itself as a pro-life organization and is representing the teacher, said it’s preparing its own response to the Senate and Education Department.
“And we are confident that Fairfax County will come to regret their decision to rush through this so-called ‘investigation,’” the organization said in its statement to WTOP.
According to “the facts presently known to FCPS,” the accused social worker “did not encourage, facilitate, or pay for any student abortion,” and former Centreville High School principal Chad Lehman “did not ‘cover up’ any such allegations or related facts; he promptly investigated” the allegations made by the Centreville teacher.
When Lehman first learned of the teacher’s claims in 2022, years before the teacher went public with them, he looked into them and found they were not supported by facts, according to the school district’s letters to the Senate committee and Education Department.
In 2023, the school system said the teacher prepared a complaint for Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares detailing the allegations of school-facilitated abortions, and that Miyares’ office may have known about the accusations a year or more ago and declined to investigate.
The school system also contends Youngkin himself may have known of the allegations for more than a year before calling for state police to investigate. In a statement to WTOP, Youngkin’s office denies that.
“The Governor learned of the allegations in August 2025 when they became public and immediately initiated this investigation,” the statement reads.
‘Originated as a response to disciplinary measures’
According to Fairfax County Public Schools’ initial findings, the teacher pushing the allegations faced a complaint in 2022 that she purchased pregnancy tests for a Centreville student, which is in violation of school policies. The school looked into it, and in that investigation, the social worker was a witness. The school eventually determined the teacher violated school district policy.
In a written report provided by Fairfax County Public Schools regarding the teacher’s pregnancy test controversy, the social worker reported to school officials that the teacher was pressuring a student to say that she did not buy her a pregnancy test, and the student told the teacher she did not want to lie.
Then, the school system said, the teacher procured handwritten notes from the student to defend herself. In one note, the student writes she got a pregnancy test from a friend.
The other note reads, in part, “She is very good teacher our friend and also a very good person, she is my best teacher of the school year she has helped me a lot in my studies, I think the other teachers are jealous of her because she has a very good relationship with the students and they love her.”
According to the school district, school officials questioned whether the teacher coerced or manipulated the student to provide the handwritten notes. The teacher said she did not approach the student for the notes, but rather the student’s guardian came to her. Both the student and her guardian contradicted that claim, the school system said.
Ultimately, the teacher was cited for unprofessional conduct in the pregnancy test incident, which “incensed” her.
In an act of apparent retaliation, the school system said in its letter responding to federal inquiries, the teacher began raising the abortion allegations against the social worker and Lehman, the school’s then-principal.
The teacher “has a documented history of making aggressive complaints against school staff and administrators whom she feels wronged by in some way,” the letter reads.
In the teacher’s own words, the letter said, her discovery that the social worker “even might have some involvement in facilitating student abortions was a “godsend” because it was “evidence” she could use “against the woman who set me up with a pregnancy test,” the letter continues.
By her own admission, from this point forward the teacher “actively conducted her own ‘investigation’ in an effort to compile ‘evidence’ against” the social worker, Fairfax County Public Schools said in its letter.
Centerpiece supporting abortion claims is fake, FCPS says
At the heart of the teacher’s retaliatory accusations, according to the school district, is a written and signed statement from the student who the teacher maintains got an abortion that was arranged and paid for by the Centreville High social worker.
The teacher said she got it by confronting the student in November 2022 at the Thai restaurant she worked in. According to the school system’s handwriting analysis, the teacher actually wrote the statement and either coerced the student to sign it or falsified her signature.
The statement, written in Spanish, says, in part, that the social worker “scheduled the appointment for me at the abortion clinic in Fairfax, paid the costs of that medical procedure, and kept everything quiet without informing my family.”
According to comments and interviews from the teacher herself cited by the school system, the teacher had no knowledge to support those claims.
Why now?
Fairfax County Public Schools, in its letter to federal officials, suggested the promotion of the story years after the accusations were first leveled may be political.
The teacher began raising the allegations of school-arranged and school-funded abortions in 2022, concerns the school district said Lehman, Centreville’s principal, looked into and dismissed. Lehman did not notify school district leaders, nor was he required to.
Throughout his inquiry into the teacher’s accusations, Lehman followed up with her, asking if she had more information to share, the school district said, to which the teacher responded she did not.
At the time of that correspondence, the teacher, by her own account, claimed to have a statement from the student saying the Centreville social worker scheduled and paid for her abortion, according to the school district.
The teacher did not share that purported statement with Lehman.
Shortly after Lehman looked into her accusations, the teacher prepared a complaint for Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’ office in March 2023. Additionally, in 2022 and 2023, figures active in Republican politics in Virginia, including the Virginia Project, a political action committee, posted on social media hinting at accusations of school-funded abortions.
Then, in August of this year, the teacher shared the story with a news outlet called W.C. Dispatch. The story breaking the news, “Bolted Doors and Broken Laws,” sits behind a paywall on that website.
After that story was published, the teacher appeared on television and in several interviews, further spreading the accusations.
“FCPS finds it very disturbing that so many of the individuals who are now (in the weeks leading up to a hotly contested election) shining a spotlight on these dated (and, our investigation shows, likely false) allegations have known about these same allegations for years. If those individuals believed these serious allegations had merit and thus believed that CHS students were truly at risk … presumably they would have taken action sooner,” the school system’s letter states.
The teacher remains actively employed as a teacher at Centreville High School, while the social worker and Lehman, now a regional executive principal in the school system, have been placed on administrative leave pending the conclusion of investigations into the abortion allegations.
Attorneys representing the teacher stand by her accusations in a statement to WTOP.
“Fairfax County Public Schools’ preliminary response to Senate and U.S. Department of Education investigations into allegations of abortion trafficking made by our client … is just the usual papering-over job by an expensive Washington, D.C. law firm. Fairfax County taxpayers now have what they likely paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, for — a thin coating of whitewash over very serious, detailed and documented charges that school personnel enabled minor girls to get abortions without their parents or guardians knowing or consenting,” the statement from Americans United for Life reads.
“AUL will have a detailed response to the Senate and DOE in the next few days, and we are confident that Fairfax County will come to regret their decision to rush through this so-called ‘investigation.’”
WTOP will report on that response when it is made available.
Fairfax County Public Schools’ full letter to the Department of Education, which was sent through legal counsel and describes more details from its investigation, can be found on the school system’s website.
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