Tag: public schools

California Ends Kamala Harris’s Truancy Law Punishing Parents

California parents will no longer face arrest if their children miss school following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Oct. 1 decision to approve legislation repealing Kamala Harris’s truancy law.

The 2011 law that the former vice president sponsored when she served as the state’s attorney general made it a misdemeanor for parents if their children were chronically truant by missing 10 percent or more of school days, starting in kindergarten.

The law punished parents with a fine of up to $2,000 or one year in county jail. At the time, she said the bill was an “effective strategy” to reduce chronic elementary school truancy and a smart approach to crime prevention.

This week, Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 461 to end the criminalization of truancy for parents and remove the 2011 law from the state’s penal code. Newsom did not explain why he signed AB 461 in his press release about legislation decisions on Oct. 1. The bill, one of 105 bills signed into law that day, takes effect on Jan. 1.

The bill’s author, Assemblyman Patrick Ahrens, a Silicon Valley Democrat, called the truancy law a “failed policy.”

“Thank you to Gov. Newsom for signing my bill to repeal this failed policy of criminalizing struggling California families for their children missing school,” Ahrens said in a statement. “Fining or imprisoning parents did nothing to get kids the education and support they need.”

While California’s truancy law remained on the books for more than a decade, school districts were becoming less likely to enforce the punitive measures against parents, according to EdSource, a nonprofit educational resource focused on the state’s school systems.

The first arrests under the law were of five parents in Orange County in 2011. The parents were handcuffed and taken to Orange County Jail before being released on their own recognizance for ignoring repeated requests to get their children to school.

While parents have been arrested in California under the truancy law, it was unclear how many cases resulted in criminal charges. Most school districts instead went beyond the law to reach out to parents with emails, letters, and phone calls to resolve truancy problems, according to the California District Attorney’s Association.

The new law was sponsored by End Child Poverty California, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California, and the Western Center on Law and Poverty. Several justice and parent organizations, including the California State Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), also supported it.

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Illegal Alien Superintendent Lied About PhD, Loses License, And Earns District A DOJ Investigation Into DEI

Ian Roberts, the Iowa superintendent who was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last Friday after fleeing from a traffic stop and ditching his district-issued vehicle (in which a loaded handgun, $3,000 in cash and a hunting knife was recovered) – completely lied about his bona fides. 

He’s also lost his superintendent’s license, while the DOJ launched an investigation hours after ICE detained him. The 54-year-old native of Guyana entered the United States on a student visa in 1999, overstayed, lied on a form claiming he was eligible to work when he was hired in 2023, and now faces deportation. 

According to the Des Moines Register, Roberts never obtained a doctoral degree from Maryland university – something which would have been easy to verify during the vetting process. Roberts has “long stated that he received a doctoral degree from Morgan State University in Baltimore. But a university spokesperson told the Des Moines Register on Monday that Roberts did not obtain a degree from the school, despite attending Morgan State from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2007.”

He attempted to obtain a doctorate in urban educational leadership. Despite his failure, Roberts has claimed on multiple occasions to have “completed” the degree at Morgan State, including in a 2009 self-published book. 

A November 2024 article published on the Des Moines Public School website claimed “Roberts excelled academically and… completed education programs at Coppin, St. John’s, Morgan State, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and an MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.”

Meanwhile, the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners revoked Roberts’ superintendent’s license on Sept. 29. 

What’s more, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the school district hours after Roberts was detained. According to the Washington Examiner, the DOJ wrote to interim superintendent Matthew Smith informing him of the investigation into the district’s alleged DEI programs. 

“Our investigation is based on information that DMPS may be engaged in employment practices that discriminate against employees, job applicants, and training program participants based on race, color, and national origin in violation of Title VII,” wrote Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon. 

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Education Department takes action on report Virginia high school worker helped student get abortion

he Education Department says it is taking “enforcement action” in response to reports a Virginia high school social work helped a student get an abortion without informing her parents.

The incident allegedly occurred at Centreville High School during the 2021-22 school year, according to a release Monday by the department.

In addition to allegedly scheduling the appointment for the 17-year-old student, the social worker also allegedly paid the clinic fees and “swore the girl to secrecy without informing the student’s parents,” the release also states.

Also, the social worker allegedly pressured another student to get an abortion, telling her she “had no other choice” and directing her to the same clinic for an abortion, which the student ultimately did not do.

The department started the enforcement action under the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, which gives parents of students the right to be notified and say no to any non-emergency, invasive physical examination or screening that is required by a school district.

“It shocks the conscience to learn that school personnel in Fairfax have allegedly exploited their positions of trust to push abortion services on students without parental knowledge or consent,” said Candice Jackson, the department’s acting general counsel.

The department requested Fairfax County Public Schools to provide information by Oct. 17 on its policies and whether federal funds were used for “sensitive medical services, including abortion-related referrals or procedures.”

The allegations regarding the social worker were first detailed in August in a Substack post, according to The Washington Post. 

The school district launched an investigation into the allegations that month and said Tuesday that it “welcomes the opportunity to answer the DOE’s questions, based on our ongoing review of these 2021 allegations.”

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REVEALED: Former Des Moines Iowa Public Schools Superintendent – An Illegal Alien From Guyana – Is a Registered Democrat, Received Mail-in Ballots in Maryland

The former Des Moines, Iowa, Public Schools Superintendent who was illegally living in the US as an ICE fugitive is a registered Democrat and received mail-in ballots in Maryland.

ICE agents last Friday arrested the Superintendent of Des Moines, Iowa, Public Schools – an illegal alien from Guyana with a prior weapons arrest.

According to Fox News, Dr. Ian Andre Roberts was an active ICE fugitive with a deportation order since May 2024. As soon as ICE agents identified themselves, Roberts fled in his car and sped off. He then abandoned his car and fled on foot. Federal agents found him hiding in shrubbery and took him into custody.

Agents found a loaded handgun and a fixed-blade hunting knife in Roberts’ vehicle.

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How a 24-year-old illegal migrant dad was caught posing as high school kid in the US — through one phone call

To the residents of Perrysburg, Ohio, his school pals and the guardians who welcomed him in, Anthony Emmanuel Labrador-Sierra was a 16-year-old human trafficking victim.

There was one problem.

He was really 24 years old and had a baby with his ex-fiancée a town over in Toledo.

His scheme worked for over a year, with authorities falling for a birth certificate he produced shaving six years off his age.

Then one night, Evelyn Camacho, 22, mother of Labrador-Sierra’s daughter, called the house where he was living.

His new guardians, a couple in their 60s named Kathy and Brad Mefferd, answered.

“I was questioning what the truth was,” said Camacho. “Did he lie to me about being an adult? Or did he lie to them about being a child? I didn’t know what was going on. And I care about him. He’s the father of my daughter,” she told The Post.

The Mefferds called the school, which in turn called the police. They also searched his room and made unsettling discoveries including a burner cellphone, fake ID, a semiautomatic pistol and three loaded 9mm magazines, according to an arrest affidavit.

Labrador-Sierra has since pleaded guilty to lying on immigration forms and on an application to purchase a firearm.

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Government Education Is Unconstitutional, Says Top US Law Professor

Government education of children funded by taxes represents an unconstitutional establishment of religion and as such, it violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and protections for religious liberty, warns Liberty University Law Professor Jeffrey Tuomala in a powerful new paper. Tuomala’s unequivocal conclusion that state “education” must go joins a growing chorus of legal arguments seeking to fundamentally re-think American education. Indeed, more and more prominent legal minds are now openly arguing that government schools violate the Constitution and must be shut down.   

Writing in Volume 18, Issue 4, of the Liberty University Law Review under the headline “Is Tax-Funded Education Unconstitutional?,” Tuomala takes aim at what he describes as government schools’ efforts to exert illegitimate control over the minds of students. He concludes that government schools must give way to privately funded Christian education.

The explosive paper, published last year, argues that the worldview underpinning public education falsely divides reality between “secular” and “religious.” And yet, a proper definition of religion such as those offered by some of America’s founders in the late 1700s would blow up the whole system.

“The present critique is not simply based on an originalist theory of constitutional interpretation, but rather it reflects a law-of-nature principle that civil government has no jurisdiction over the mind,” argues Tuomala in the abstract of his paper, which runs well over 100 pages.  

Part of the problem is longstanding public and judicial confusion about the meaning of the term “religion” itself. As Tuomala explains in his paper, the U.S. Supreme Court has never made a serious effort to define it, other than mentioning past sources. And so, he goes to great lengths to help properly define the term by citing legendary legal minds of the past.

Two of America’s most important Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — put a great deal of thought into the meaning of religion. Tuomala cites their views in his paper, describing in depth how Virginia, under their guidance, disestablished the official Anglican church and instituted religious freedom.

The principles articulated by those towering Founding Fathers during the critical battle in Virginia laid the foundation for the Constitution’s First Amendment. That provision, which prohibits federal laws respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, cannot be understood without the historical context.

In the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Madison and George Mason defined religion succinctly: “The duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it.” Jefferson, meanwhile, blasted state efforts to interfere with one’s views. “Almighty God hath created the mind free,” he wrote in the “Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom.”

And yet, today, government is shaping the minds of over 60 million American children by “educating” them for at least five days a week for 12 years with ideas that are profoundly religious. “Public schools have become the chief means by which all levels of civil government have established religion in the United States,” explains Tuomala’s paper.

Ironically, even John Dewey, widely recognized as the architect of America’s modern government-school regime, acknowledged that his humanistic views were deeply religious. More and more, values, morals, and modes of thinking that are outright pagan are taught to children in government schools as if they were the only possible truth.  

Despite the godlessness and even pagan nature of modern government-controlled education, there are powerful similarities with what the Constitution prohibits in terms of religion. “The parallels between the forms of state-church relationships and state-school relationships — as establishments of religion — are striking,” Tuomala continues.

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Why it was easy for an illegal immigrant to land top job in Des Moines’ public schools

The arrest of an illegal immigrant serving as the Des Moines, Iowa, superintendent of schools has exposed a broader problem in America’s public education system: Few of them are using E-Verify, the federal government’s tool to weed out people not authorized to work.

Iowa has revoked the education license of Ian Andre Roberts, the Guyanese immigrant who was helming the state’s largest school system despite his defiance of a deportation order issued more than a year ago.

Late Monday, the school board voted to put him on unpaid leave, and said unless he proves his work status by Tuesday, he’ll be fired.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mr. Roberts on Friday, moving to enforce a final deportation order an immigration judge issued last year. Authorities said Mr. Roberts fled in his Des Moines-issued vehicle, then abandoned it and ran before being tracked down.

When officers later searched his vehicle, they found a handgun, which illegal immigrants cannot possess under the law.

ICE said the case should be a “wake-up call” to communities to better check their hires.

“How this illegal alien was hired without work authorization, a final order of removal, and a prior weapons charge is beyond comprehension and should alarm the parents of that school district,” said Sam Olson, director of the ICE deportation field office that covers Des Moines.

Jackie Norris, chair of the school board, said Mr. Roberts claimed to be a citizen.

She said he presented a driver’s license and Social Security card and filled out Homeland Security’s I-9 form, the paper-based process for verifying someone is eligible to work. She said the school system had no reason to doubt his claims until last week.

But experts said if the school system had used E-Verify, it could have blocked him and avoided the embarrassing black eye.

“Every school district in the United States should be using E-Verify, if simply to protect the children they are responsible for,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Immigration Accountability Project.

E-Verify is voluntary at the federal level, though some states make it mandatory for employers within their borders. A bill to add Iowa to that list cleared the state Senate last year but did not make it through final passage.

Of the more than 10,000 school districts in the U.S., only a few hundred are listed as users of E-Verify in the program’s database, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

A few of those districts are in Iowa, including Storm Lake and the Ballard Community school districts. Des Moines is not among them.

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Des Moines Public Schools Placed Superintendent, an Illegal Alien Fugitive From Guyana, on PAID LEAVE — Board Chair Begs Public to “Cool Down the Rhetoric”: “Enough with the Name Calling… We are Talking About Human Being”

The scandal rocking Des Moines, Iowa, Public Schools has taken an even darker turn after revelations that Superintendent Dr. Ian Andre Roberts, an illegal alien fugitive from Guyana with a deportation order, was placed on paid leave following his dramatic arrest by ICE agents.

ICE agents on Friday arrested Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Ian Andre Roberts, an illegal alien fugitive from Guyana who had been living under a deportation order since May 2024.

According to Fox News reporter Bill Melugin, Roberts fled from ICE agents in his car once they identified themselves, speeding away before abandoning the vehicle and attempting to escape on foot. He was ultimately found hiding in shrubbery with the assistance of an Iowa State Police K9.

Inside his vehicle, agents recovered a loaded Glock 19 handgun, a fixed-blade hunting knife, and $3,000 in cash. Roberts reportedly has a prior weapons arrest dating back to 2020.

Despite this, Roberts was hired as Superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools in July 2023, after a national search process involving an outside firm.

He was granted a superintendent license by the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners in the same year, with an FBI criminal background check that somehow failed to flag his immigration issues.

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Democrats Rage, Leftist NGO Mobilizes After ICE Arrest Of Iowa’s Top School Superintendent

Democrats expressed “national outrage” after the ICE arrest of Ian Roberts, an illegal alien from Guyana who somehow became the Superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, the largest school district in Iowa. Roberts competed as an Olympic athlete and distance runner for Guyana 25 years ago, but this apparently didn’t help him escape immigration enforcement and his active warrants.

At the time of his arrest, Roberts was working as the Superintendent despite being an illegal alien with a final order of removal and no work authorization. He was caught with a firearm in his possession (which is illegal to carry for a non-citizen), as well as a hunting knife and $3000 cash. Roberts had previous warrants for weapons possession charges in February of 2020.  

Democrats claim that these ICE arrests and Trump’s deportation policies are directly to blame for the now numerous shootings committed by leftist activists. In other words, conservatives who are enforcing constitutional immigration laws are to blame when leftists try to kill them.

During a targeted enforcement operation on Sept. 26, 2025, officers approached Roberts in his vehicle after identifying himself, but he sped away. Officers later discovered his vehicle abandoned near a wooded area. State Patrol assisted in locating the subject and he was taken into ICE custody.

“This suspect was arrested in possession of a loaded weapon in a vehicle provided by Des Moines Public Schools after fleeing federal law enforcement,” said ICE ERO St. Paul Field Office Director Sam Olson. “This should be a wake-up call for our communities to the great work that our officers are doing every day to remove public safety threats. How this illegal alien was hired without work authorization, a final order of removal, and a prior weapons charge is beyond comprehension and should alarm the parents of that school district.”

The arrest spurred a protest outside the federal courthouse in Des Moines.

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The Details Surrounding ICE’s Arrest of Iowa School Superintendent Are Shocking

Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested the Superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, Ian Andre Roberts, a criminal illegal alien from Guyana, on Thursday. 

Roberts, head of the largest public school district in the state, was in possession of a loaded handgun, $3,000 in cash, and a fixed blade hunting knife at the time of his arrest, according to a statement from ICE. 

He entered the U.S. in 1999 on a student visa and in May of 2024, was given a final order of removal by an immigration judge. He also had existing weapon possession charges from 2020. 

Authorities approached Roberts during a targeted enforcement operation, but he fled in his vehicle, which was later found near a wooded area, ICE said. Iowa State Patrol assisted in locating Roberts. 

“This suspect was arrested in possession of a loaded weapon in a vehicle provided by Des Moines Public Schools after fleeing federal law enforcement,” said ICE ERO St. Paul Field Office Director Sam Olson in a statement. “This should be a wake-up call for our communities to the great work that our officers are doing every day to remove public safety threats. How this illegal alien was hired without work authorization, a final order of removal, and a prior weapons charge is beyond comprehension and should alarm the parents of that school district.”

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