Tag: public schools

California teachers were right to severely punish girl, 7, for writing these words under Black Lives Matter drawing she gave to friend, judge rules

A California judge has ruled that teachers were right to punish a seven-year-old girl over a Black Lives Matter drawing because ‘she’s too young to have First Amendment rights.’

The first grader was banned from recess and drawing pictures at Viejo Elementary in Orange County after she added the words ‘any life’ below Black Lives Matter on a picture she drew and and gave to a black friend.

The picture showed the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ with four round shapes in various different tones of brown, beige and yellow, which was intended to ‘represent her friends’ who were ‘racially-mixed’. 

The girl’s family filed a lawsuit last year against the Capistrano Unified School District, claiming her First Amendment Rights were violated during the 2021 incident.

But US Central District Court Judge David Card ruled that ‘Students have the right to be free from speech that denigrates their race while at school’. Card added that the drawing was not protected by the First Amendment because of the age of the girl, named B.B. in the suit, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Judge Card wrote: ‘An elementary school … is not a marketplace of ideas… Thus, the downsides of regulating speech there is not as significant as it is in high schools, where students are approaching voting age and controversial speech could spark conducive conversation.’

Moreover, Judge Card wrote, ‘a parent might second-guess (the principal’s) conclusion, but his decision to discipline B.B. belongs to him, not the federal courts.’

Card added that ‘Undoubtedly, B.B.’s intentions were innocent… B.B. testified that she gifted the Drawing to M.C. to make her feel comfortable after her class learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’

B.B. was punished by her school after her friend, known as M.C. in the suit, took the picture home, where a parent saw it and found it offensive, emailing the school and demanding they take action.

This prompted principal Jesus Becerra to tell B.B. the drawing was inappropriate and racist. He then punished B.B. by making her publicly apologize on the playground to her classmates and teachers. B.B. was also banned from recess and from drawing pictures for two weeks.

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SATANISTS to volunteer in Florida schools following signing of new law that allows religious personnel to be employed in public schools

Public schools in Florida might soon be swarmed with members of the Satanic Temple as Gov. Ron DeSantis has put the call out for more school counselors following the signing of a state law allowing religious chaplains into public schools amid staffing shortages.

House Bill 931, which came into effect this July, permits outside organizations to provide “additional counseling and support to students.” DeSantis has made it clear that the law is intended as a means to legally reintroduce Christian values into public education.

However, the bill has left the implementation of chaplaincy programs to individual school districts and only requires schools to list a volunteer’s religion “if any.” (Related: Satanic temple in Texas files lawsuit demanding “religious right” to sacrifice babies through abortion.)

The Satanic Temple sees this as an opportunity to challenge the unconstitutional favoritism toward Christianity. Satanic Temple co-founder and spokesperson Lucien Greaves argued that if Christian chaplains are granted access to students, then so should their members, to maintain the separation of church and state.

“You have theocrats pushing further and further, signing unconstitutional bills into law, and they realize there’s no consequence,” Greaves said. “They’re giving everybody the impression that these types of things are legal, this is just the environment we’re living in. And in that way, they’re really numbing people to when these things actually do take effect, or when they are upheld by a corrupt judge who’s just playing partisan politics.”

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Forbidden Fruit and the Classroom: The Huge American Sex-Abuse Scandal That Educators Scandalously Suppress

Every day millions of parents put their children under the care of public school teachers, administrators, and support staff. Their trust, however, is frequently broken by predators in authority in what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history.

Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.

For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.

“In any given year they have failed to report thousands of these situations, and instead they’ve papered them over, acted like it’s not an issue,” former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told RealClearInvestigations. Stunned by a 2018 Chicago Tribune investigation that found 523 incident reports of sexual misconduct by employees of the city’s schools during the past decade, DeVos during the Trump administration launched the process of including specific questions about such cases in the Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection, a process it undertakes every two years. Previously, the Office for Civil Rights asked only general questions about sexual misconduct incidents, without a breakdown of alleged perpetrators.

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Harvard Leftist Summer Reading List Recommends Book On How To Indoctrinate Students With CRT

Harvard University’s summer reading list includes various books covering topics like transgenderism, feminism, and racism, including one book that states that educators should teach their students ideas related to Critical Race Theory.

We’ve got recommendations from the Harvard community, titles from Harvard authors, and a glimpse inside some new releases,” the school’s website reads.

A page titled “Need a good book?” under Harvard’s “Summer Reads” section advertises “We Want to Do More Than Survive,” a book that argues that “the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color.”

Harvard doctoral student, DeAnza Cook, says the book is a “powerful appeal to build transformative educational homeplaces rooted in abolitionist pedagogies for liberation,” and recommends it for “[diversity, inclusion, and belonging] educators and enthusiasts.”

The book urges that educators “must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements.”

The author of the book, Dr. Bettina Love, is a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, who previously said her work focuses on “help[ing] white people become less racist.” She also previously wrote that educators should “[r]emove all punitive or disciplinary practices that spirit murder Black, Brown, and Indigenous children.”

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Schoolchildren Are Being Indoctrinated With Hard Left Ideology Under the Guise of Teaching Them to be ‘Inclusive’

Not so long ago I rewatched the original Jurassic Park and was struck by Ian Malcolm’s monologue in which he says to John Hammond, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” It struck me that this unintentionally captured the essence of a growing problem in today’s education system: EDI. School managers and teachers are so eager to rush into whatever is trending in EDI. So convinced are they, without any evidence, of EDI’s supposed moral, ethical, educational and societal benefits that they neglect to consider whether they should be promoting it. 

The virtues of EDI are extolled throughout the education system and my own school is no different. Schools openly bow down to EDI and an entire industry has developed to ensure EDI is embedded across the education system, despite evidence that it has had detrimental effects in the workplace. It is commonplace now to see schools advertising themselves as “inclusive” and numerous websites have popped up to promote EDI, such as the Inclusive Schools Network. The EDI approach has ostensibly been embraced because Britain is now a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society and it’s supposedly essential to help tackle discrimination, break down stereotypes, facilitate better communication and foster social cohesion. However, I think the push for “inclusivity” distorts education, disempowers the individual and poses a threat to a free society.

One assertion that’s frequently made these days is that “inclusive language” should be used in lessons. But what, exactly, is it? Who defines it? And how can such a thing exist in any case? The economist Ludwig von Mises observed in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis how Marxism thrived on “dialectic artificialities” and a “word-fetishism” which made it “possible to unite incompatible ideas and demands” (e.g. Queers for Palestine). This linguistic sleight of hand can be used to brainwash the broader population, and this is exactly what “inclusive language” does. Those who advocate “inclusive language” claim it’s a tool for promoting open conversations. But for “inclusive language” to exist and function, it must by its very nature be at odds with intellectual diversity, free speech and democratic values. It requires a central authority to dictate what is or is not inclusive, thereby strengthening that authority’s power, while discriminating against those who are deemed to have said something offensive. 

The drive to use “inclusive language” and to be “inclusive” is in reality exclusionary and intolerant. A cursory glance through some typical ‘guidance’, such as that produced by the University of Leeds, reveals that it usually focuses on what not to say rather than on what to say. The implications of this are worrying as it’s a method of importing identity politics and ideological authoritarianism into schools. As John Stuart Mill noted in On Liberty, “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility”. By pursuing “inclusive language”, school managers are going along with this linguistic totalitarianism and, in my experience, are never open to any discussion about whether they are embarking on the best approach for pupils and staff. 

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Schoolchildren Are Being Indoctrinated With Hard Left Ideology Under the Guise of Teaching Them to be ‘Inclusive’

Not so long ago I rewatched the original Jurassic Park and was struck by Ian Malcolm’s monologue in which he says to John Hammond, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” It struck me that this unintentionally captured the essence of a growing problem in today’s education system: EDI. School managers and teachers are so eager to rush into whatever is trending in EDI. So convinced are they, without any evidence, of EDI’s supposed moral, ethical, educational and societal benefits that they neglect to consider whether they should be promoting it. 

The virtues of EDI are extolled throughout the education system and my own school is no different. Schools openly bow down to EDI and an entire industry has developed to ensure EDI is embedded across the education system, despite evidence that it has had detrimental effects in the workplace. It is commonplace now to see schools advertising themselves as “inclusive” and numerous websites have popped up to promote EDI, such as the Inclusive Schools Network. The EDI approach has ostensibly been embraced because Britain is now a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society and it’s supposedly essential to help tackle discrimination, break down stereotypes, facilitate better communication and foster social cohesion. However, I think the push for “inclusivity” distorts education, disempowers the individual and poses a threat to a free society.

One assertion that’s frequently made these days is that “inclusive language” should be used in lessons. But what, exactly, is it? Who defines it? And how can such a thing exist in any case? The economist Ludwig von Mises observed in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis how Marxism thrived on “dialectic artificialities” and a “word-fetishism” which made it “possible to unite incompatible ideas and demands” (e.g. Queers for Palestine). This linguistic sleight of hand can be used to brainwash the broader population, and this is exactly what “inclusive language” does. Those who advocate for “inclusive language” claim it’s a tool for promoting open conversations. But for “inclusive language” to exist and function, it must by its very nature be at odds with intellectual diversity, free speech and democratic values. It requires a central authority to dictate what is or is not inclusive, thereby strengthening that authority’s power, while discriminating against those who are deemed to have said something offensive. 

The drive to use “inclusive language” and to be “inclusive” is in reality exclusionary and intolerant. A cursory glance through some typical ‘guidance’, such as that produced by the University of Leeds, reveals that it usually focuses on what not to say rather than on what to say. The implications of this are worrying as it’s a method of importing identity politics and ideological authoritarianism into schools. As John Stuart Mill noted in On Liberty, “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility”. By pursuing “inclusive language”, school managers are going along with this linguistic totalitarianism and, in my experience, are never open to any discussion about whether they are embarking on the best approach for pupils and staff. 

On one level, the emphasis on “inclusive language” encourages others to find offence where none is intended and in doing so undermines resilience. It feeds a culture of victimhood and is hardly beneficial to learning, where failure is often a necessary precursor to success. On another level, it establishes a right not to be offended. This type of approach is fundamentally unworkable, as we have seen through inane legislation like Scotland’s Hate Crime Act. By seeking to protect certain identity groups from being offended, it introduces a form of bullying into a school since it provides bad actors, both pupils and staff, with the perfect cudgel to attack their opponents. 

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Louisiana Parents Sue Over Law Mandating 10 Commandments Displays in Classrooms

Last month, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed a bill mandating that a copy of the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public school classrooms in Louisiana. The law, House Bill 71, requires that the religious scripture be displayed on a poster or frame sized at least 11 inches by 14 inches and in a “large, easily readable font.” 

Apparently anticipating a First Amendment challenge to the mandatory religious text, lawmakers included several provisions that attempt to strengthen the law against a constitutional challenge. For example, the law prohibits schools from using taxpayer funds to finance the posters, instead directing them to accept private donations.

The law further directs schools to display a context document that describes “the history of the Ten Commandments in American Public Education.” This requirement attempts to undermine the religious nature of the scripture, instead showing how the “historical role of the Ten Commandments accords with our nation’s history and faithfully reflects the understanding of the founders of our nation with respect to the necessity of civic morality to a functional self-government.”

While the text of the law attempts to dodge accusations that it prescribes public schools to display an openly Christian text in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, Louisiana lawmakers openly argued that the law would put religion in Louisiana schools.

“I really believe that we are lacking in direction. A lot of people, their children, are not attending churches or whatever,” Rep. Sylvia Taylor (D–Laplace), a co-author and co-sponsor of the bill, said during a debate over the bill. “So what I’m saying is, we need to do something in the schools to bring people back to where they need to be.” Another sponsor state Rep. Dodie Horton (R–Haughton) said that the bill “seeks to have a display of God’s law in the classroom for children to see what He says is right and what He says is wrong.”

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UFO records archive finds new home with Rio Rancho Public Schools

The City of Vision is home to the largest collection of records about UFO sightings in North America.

KOB 4 found out you’ll soon be able to read through all of them yourself, and it sounds like they’ll need a lot of time.

“How you interpret what a UFO is, you know, is it miss identification of something prosaic? Is it alien? Is it something else? It doesn’t matter, at the end of the day it’s history,” said David Marler, executive director of the National UFO Historical Records Center.

Marler believes that history belongs to everyone.

“Whether you relegate UFOs, to fact fiction or folklore, it’s part of our history, it’s part of our culture. And I feel that regardless of belief, or non belief in the subject, we need to preserve this element of our culture,” said Marler. 

Marler built an addition to his Rio Rancho home to house the thousands of documents he’s collected over the years. Everything from declassified Project Blue Book files to newspaper clippings, air traffic control radio recordings are all packed inside a small room.

“It is essentially a traditional historical archive, albeit dedicated to a non-traditional subject,” said Marler. 

His collection, officially known as the National UFO Historical Records Center, is growing. Marler says more archivists are sending him their collections, so everything is under one roof.

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School APOLOGISES For Teaching Children That ISIS Is A Terrorist Group After Muslims Complain

A middle school in New Jersey has issued an apology for teaching children that the Islamic State (ISIS) is a designated terrorist organisation.

Students at Schuyler Colfax Middle School in Wayne, New Jersey, were asked to select one answer in a multiple choice test that fits with the description, “It is a terrorist organization that commits acts of violence, destroys cultural artifacts, and encourages loss of life in order to achieve its goal of global rule under strict Islamic Sharia law.”

The choice of answers was the Islamic State, Peru’s The Shining Path, al Qaeda, and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, with Islamic State being the ‘correct’ answer.

In response, a group known as ‘Teaching While Muslim’ (TWM), charged “We have seen anti Muslim & anti Palestinian sentiments, teachers, and content in our schools over and over again. But we must not allow it to continue.”

The social media post from the group continued “Call and email everyone that you can. This is NOT okay on a million levels. Go. And yes. This is real.” 

The post ended with the hashtags “anti-Muslim racism” and “Islamophobia.”

In a further statement, the group claimed that the test “wrongly implies that terrorism is a fundamental part of an ‘Islamic State,’ and has a ‘goal of achieving global rule under strict sharia law.’” 

The group further described that as “anti-Muslim hate” and “factually inaccurate,” asserting “This is a continuation of US and Zionist propaganda aimed at fear mongering against Muslims AND Palestinians.”

“Why is the PLO on that quiz?” The statement continued, despite it being the incorrect answer to the question. 

“This is indoctrinating children to hate Muslims and making Muslim students targets of bigotry and prejudice in a place where they should feel safe,” the statement concluded.

Following this, the school caved and issued an apology.

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Louisiana becomes first state to require that Ten Commandments be displayed in public classrooms

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday.

The GOP-drafted legislation mandates that a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” be required in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities. Although the bill did not receive final approval from Landry, the time for gubernatorial action – to sign or veto the bill – has lapsed.

Opponents question the law’s constitutionality, warning that lawsuits are likely to follow. Proponents say the purpose of the measure is not solely religious, but that it has historical significance. In the law’s language, the Ten Commandments are described as “foundational documents of our state and national government.”

The American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday it was joining Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom from Religion Foundation to file a lawsuit challenging the new Louisiana legislation.

“The law violates the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional,” the groups said in a joint statement. “The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government. Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools. “

In April, State Senator Royce Duplessis told CBS affiliate WWL-TV that he opposed the legislation. 

“That’s why we have a separation of church and state,” said Duplessis, who is a Democrat. “We learned the 10 Commandments when we went to Sunday school. As I said on the Senate floor, if you want your kids to learn the Ten Commandments, you can take them to church.”

The displays, which will be paired with a four-paragraph “context statement” describing how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025.

The posters would be paid for through donations. State funds will not be used to implement the mandate, based on language in the legislation.

The law also “authorizes” – but does not require – the display of the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence and the Northwest Ordinance in K-12 public schools.

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