Founded in 1904 at Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., the Potomac School was located for many years on California St., N.W. Since 1951, it has been situated on a campus in McLean, Virginia. In 1949, Potomac School played a role in the famous trial of alleged Soviet spyAlger Hiss. Priscilla Hiss was a teacher at the school in the late 1930s, when her husband worked in the State Department. At the trial, the government alleged that Priscilla Hiss used the family’s typewriter to copy secret documents that Alger Hiss had stolen from the State Department. Prosecutors introduced expert testimony to show that an application for admission to Potomac School, typed by Alger Hiss for his stepson, was produced on the same typewriter as government documents that he allegedly provided to Whittaker Chambers. When the FBI visited Potomac to request access to correspondence relating to the Hiss family, the school’s headmistress initially refused, saying that even if Alger Hiss told her that he was a Soviet spy, she wouldn’t believe him. In 2011, a former Potomac student accused a former Intermediate School teacher and administrator of abusing her when she had been a student in the late 1960s. The teacher was arrested by Fairfax County police in November 2012. He was convicted in October 2013 of molesting five girls, and was sentenced to 43 years in prison. The Potomac School initiated an independent investigation into the matter, which was completed in June 2014. The investigation determined that evidence existed to suggest that the teacher had molested as many as 26 girls, and uncovered allegations that three other teachers had engaged in inappropriate sexual encounters with students. The report further determined that school officials were aware of the abuse and failed to notify the authorities, nor did they inform the teacher's future employers of his history after he was terminated in 1994 for performance failings. The school announced that it would turn its investigative results over to Fairfax County police and would institute comprehensive training in abuse prevention, universal background checks on all employees and volunteers, and standardized practices for handling abuse complaints.
