On Thursday, Dr. Steve Walts, Superintendent of Prince William County Schools, suspended his twitter account after the Prince William County School Board hired a law firm to review his interactions with students on social media.

Prince William County Public Schools Policy 503.02-1 states, “Except as provided herein, employees shall not communicate with students using cell phone and other personal electronic forms of communication, including, but not limited to, Facebook, Snapchat, and texting.”

In a Twitter thread, Ryan Sawyers, former chairman of the Prince William County School Board, alleged that Walts had exchanged more than 10,000 messages on his Twitter account and interacted with students at 11 p.m. as well as encouraged PWCS students to compare him to Christ.

@SuperPWCS, the highest paid superintendent in Virginia, has been caught messaging teenage girls at 11 pm. @PWCSNews says there are 10,000+ messages.

Now we find out that @SuperPWCS plays along and encourages kids to compare him to Jesus Christ.

When is enough, enough? pic.twitter.com/DvkqD0oDtW

— Ryan Sawyers (@RyanSawyers) May 5, 2020

Policy 503.02-1 also states that employees should not access students’ personal social media accounts. However, an investigation by Potomac Local News found that Walts is following at least 80 students on Twitter.

After outlets began to report on the situation, Walts posted a video on his Twitter account announcing that he would be suspending his account. In the video he states, “Unfortunately, a former School Board Member, who was previously censured by the School Board for his behavior, along with his proxies, have chosen to launch a partisan and personal attack on me.”

The video was later deleted from Twitter and replaced with a link to a transcript. 

I spoke with Willie Deutsch, former school board member for the Coles District. Deutsch, along with three other members of the board, voted against extending Walts’s contract in 2019.

Deutsch said that he was concerned about Walts’s social media presence in the past, but he hadn’t seen it at the level that it has been compiled up to now.

In a separate Twitter thread, Sawyers suggested that the school board counsel would try to defend Walts by claiming ‘he’s not an employee and doesn’t have to follow regulations’.

“There shouldn’t be two tiers of justice,” Deutsch said when asked about that defense. “The superintendent and senior administration should have to abide by the same rules that they set for teachers, and I think teachers know that they could not get away with what the superintendent has done.”

I also spoke with Joseph George, a father and former school board candidate for the Neabsco District seat in 2015 and 2019. 

“Encouraging that activity and engaging in that activity is certainly not what this county needs and especially not our county schools,” George said when asked about Walts encouraging students to compare him to Christ. “It’s a case where he’s been allowed to do it, and nobody has had an issue with it until the present time.”

Walts’s claim of this being a partisan attack against him does not hold up. Sawyers has advertised himself as a progressive Democrat, even running for Congress for a brief period in 2018, and Deutsch is the former chairman of the Prince William County Young Republicans.

“It can’t be a partisan attack because Willie Deutsch is a Republican and Ryan Sawyers is a Democrat,” said George. “[…]No one who can defend his actions can come up with a legitimate reason why any leader would have to communicate with a student at 11—11:30 at night and then the very next day go to the school and attempt to pull that student out of class when the student asked when grades were coming out.”

Walts could not be reached for comment, and current members of the Prince William County School Board are unable to comment due to the nature of the situation.