Kirk Twigg, a far-right member of a county school board in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, which is just outside of the Washington, D.C., area, has been criminally charged with a felony offense that could land him with up to 10 years in prison if found guilty.
Twigg’s alleged offenses include forging a public record, which is the felony, and tampering with a county record. Judicial documents, at least those publicly available, apparently don’t specify the contents of the records he corruptly altered, but available details spotlighted in a report from The Free Lance-Star connect the allegations to Twigg’s handling of a contract for someone he backed to serve as superintendent. At a meeting of the school board in September of last year, local resident William Scheff raised allegations that Twigg altered the contract for interim superintendent Kelly Guempel to show a monthly salary much higher, by thousands of dollars, than what was originally listed. At the time, Twigg was chair of the board.
“[Twigg] took it upon himself to nearly double the salary of the acting superintendent in secret,” Scheff said. “This is malfeasance, plain and simple.” A member of the board backed up details of Scheff’s account, which at least in part, Scheff indicated, was based on an available feed of an earlier meeting held last June. “He’s not going to lie to me about that,” school board member Dawn Shelley said of Guempel, who she indicated informed her of details of the incident. “Mr. Twigg forged a contract and if people up here are defending him, then they’re just as guilty as he is.” Guempel has also served as a principal in the county, and Shelley also indicated that she provided information she had about what happened to investigators.
Twigg has a history of far-right rhetoric, supporting the idea in a previous meeting of the school board of burning books he found objectionable — an idea that obviously has extremely direct correlates in past totalitarian regimes, not to mention the much more recent actions of entities like the Russian invading forces in Ukraine. Twigg was mad about material with sexually explicit content, a category that’s been used on the Right to target mentions of LGBTQ+ people and their concerns in significant capacities at all. In past comments, Shelley — the fellow member of the board — also raised complaints about Twigg’s stance on these books, in addition to his apparent discussion of HR issues in public and the issue of him “constantly using his AOL account to send and read emails throughout school board meetings,” she said.
Twigg’s ideas have close reflections in policies from Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis, who infamously signed a piece of legislation into law that sharply restricts discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms. A newly proposed bill was also unveiled this week that would ban gender studies majors — and minors! — at public colleges and universities, besides mandating students in general education courses on communication learn from the specifically Western tradition and restricting courses from presenting American history — genocide, slavery, and all — in systematically negative terms, at least in certain areas of discussion. That’s not freedom!
