Tag: public schools

Federal court dismisses case against LA school Covid shot mandate

A federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit challenging the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) Covid-19 vaccine mandate for employees.

The case was brought in 2021 by the Health Freedom Defense Fund and   California Educators for Medical Freedom on behalf of school employees. More than 1,000 employees lost their jobs after refusing Covid shots. Plaintiffs argued the mandate violated their right to refuse unwanted medical treatment, especially since the shots did not prevent transmission.

The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in an 11-judge “en banc” decision, ruled that LAUSD had the authority to require Covid vaccination in 2021. At the time, public health authorities, including the CDC, were advising that the shots would protect public health.

Several judges dissented, warning the decision comes “perilously close” to allowing the government to mandate medical treatments “so long as it asserts — even if incorrectly — that it would promote public health and safety.”

The majority opinion relied on the 1905 Supreme Court case Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld a smallpox vaccine mandate. The dissenting judges said Jacobson applies only to vaccines that stop disease transmission, which plaintiffs argued Covid shots do not do.

LAUSD ended its employee vaccine mandate in September 2023. However, plaintiffs say they still suffer harm, including lost wages and career damage, and warn the policy could return. They are considering an appeal to the US Supreme Court.

“This ruling should terrify every American because the court is essentially saying it doesn’t matter whether or not health authorities lie, it doesn’t matter whether or not vaccines actually have a public health impact. All that matters is that someone is afraid and tells you that this is the right way to address the problem, and then you have to comply.”
— Leslie Manookian, Health Freedom Defense Fund

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Mamdani’s Plan for Schools Draws Angry Backlash from New York Parents

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani continues to make waves with his radical agenda. This time he’s targeting charter schools, producing some strong reactions from parents and residents.

In an exclusive report by The New York Post, the newspaper wrote that Mamdani “plans to declare war on charter schools if he’s elected mayor,” according to a survey he answered June before the Democratic primary.

The state assemblyman said he would “fight efforts to open more charters, which largely educate minority, working-class students, and even opposed the schools sharing space in city-owned buildings,” the article read.

“I oppose efforts by the state to mandate an expansion of charter school operations in New York City,” he said in a Staten Island Advance questionnaire.

Mother Arlene Rosado, who has a son in 10th grade at the “Nuasin Next Generation” K-12 charter school in the Bronx, said Mamdani doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“I don’t understand why Mamdani would be hostile to charter schools,” she said. “I think he’s very misinformed.”

Rosado reportedly moved her son there because he was being bullied in public school. His situation has since improved after he was given the option to leave.

“Charter schools are helping kids in the community,” Rosado added. “You should always have a choice. Taking that choice away is not cool.”

The socialist candidate claimed charter schools divert public resources and mainly serve the wealthy, while harming lower-income families, The Hill reported last month.

Mamdani also promised to conduct audits of charter schools that are within the city’s Department of Education buildings, claiming they get too much public money.

“I also oppose the co-locating of charter schools inside DOE school buildings, but for those already co-located my administration would undertake a comprehensive review of charter school funding to address the unevenness of our system,” his survey answer read.

He added, “Matching funds, overcharged rent, and Foundation Aid funding would be part of this audit as my administration determined how to manage the reality of co-located schools and legal entitlements.”

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Zohran Mamdani Opposes Charter Schools in NYC, Even Though He Went to a Private School

New York City Democrat candidate for mayor, and noted communist, Zohran Mamdani has gone on record saying that he opposes charter schools in the city.

When Mamdani came to the United States as a child, he attended the Bank Street School for Children, a private school that charges $37,554 – $68,793 in tuition, according to Wikipedia.

There are two important issues in play here.

First, charter schools are important because they offer an alternative to traditional public schools, which frequently benefits minority children. Second, charter schools are typically opposed by teacher unions who correctly see these schools as a form of competition for public schools. As a Democrat candidate, Mamdani is undoubtedly depending on the support of teacher unions in the mayoral election.

The New York Post reports:

Zohran Mamdani’s vow to declare war on charter schools if elected NYC mayor sparks outrage from parents, advocates: ‘Very misinformed’

Socialist Zohran Mamdani plans to declare war on charter schools if he’s elected mayor, according to a survey he answered — sparking outrage from advocates and parents who called the front-runner’s views “very misguided.”

The 33-year-old Queens assemblyman said he would fight efforts to open more charters, which largely educate minority, working-class students, and even opposed the schools sharing space in city-owned buildings.

“I oppose efforts by the state to mandate an expansion of charter school operations in New York City,” he said in a Staten Island Advance questionnaire before the June 24 Democratic primary.

Mamdani’s hostility to charter schools — which are privately run and publicly funded — puts him in sync with the United Federation of Teachers union, which endorsed him in the November general election following his primary victory over ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and others.

So typical for the left. School choices for me but not for thee.

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School district must convince jury it can fire Christians for not using students’ transgender names

Two months before the Supreme Court dramatically expanded employers’ obligations to grant religious accommodations to employees, rejecting a throwaway line in a 1977 ruling that was widely used to deny accommodations, a Chicago-based federal appeals court ruled that calling students by their last names for the sake of religious conscience was a fireable offense.

Two years later, the same three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cleaned the egg off its face after reviewing former music teacher John Kluge’s second loss in district court in light of the High Court’s precedent for former postal worker Gerald Groff.

Indiana’s Brownsburg Community Schools Corp. will have to convince a jury that it yanked Kluge’s yearlong last-name accommodation and ordered him to either resign or address transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns, in violation of his Christian faith, because the district would have otherwise suffered “substantial increased costs.”

“Because material factual disputes exist, we reverse the district court’s grant of summary judgment to the school on Kluge’s accommodation claim and remand for further proceedings,” said the majority opinion by Judge Michael Brennan, joined by Judge Amy St. Eve, both nominated by President Trump.

They cited “insufficient evidence to conclude that calling students by their last names, without more, would inflict emotional harm on a reasonable person,” and that Brownsburg hadn’t shown Kluge’s practice resulted in emotional distress “under an objective standard.”

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Report: Fairfax County Public Schools Investigates Claims Staff Arranged Students’ Abortions Without Parents’ Knowledge

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Virginia has opened an investigation into allegations school staff arranged abortions for students without parental notification and consent.

The investigation is based on claims from a report that school officials at Centreville High School in Union Hill arranged and paid for students’ abortions in 2021, including a 17-year-old girl, local news outlet WJLA reported.

“We learned yesterday of these concerning allegations from 2021,” FCPS told the outlet in a statement on Wednesday. “We are launching an immediate and comprehensive investigation as we take all concerns of student wellbeing very seriously.”

FCPS said “not to [our] knowledge” when the outlet pressed as whether staff have ever arranged abortions for students.

“We have launched an immediate investigation into these concerns as soon as we were made aware,” the district added.  

The district has a policy stating that ““every effort shall be made to encourage and support students suspecting pregnancy to discuss their concerns with their parents or guardians.” The policy does not require staff to tell parents, but it states: “In no case shall personnel commit themselves to maintain such information confidentially, keeping it from parents, guardians, or appropriate school authorities.”

The district told the outlet that district employees do not arrange abortions for FCPS students who are minors. When asked if FCPS employees inform students about abortions and where to get them, the district did not directly answer. 

“Students are referred to the public health nurse for any health-related matters. The public health nurses are Fairfax County Health Department employees,” the district told the outlet. 

Virginia state law requires parental consent and notification before a minor can obtain an abortion. 

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Whites underrepresented in prestigious high schools after courts uphold ‘proxy’ preferences: suit

What good is the Supreme Court’s two-year-old ban on racial preferences in educational admissions if the high court lets other high-demand schools flagrantly flout it?

That’s what justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas asked their colleagues last year when SCOTUS declined to review a ruling that upheld an admissions scheme explicitly designed to change racial demographics in Boston’s most prestigious public high schools, several months after the duo scolded the court for declining a similar Virginia case across the river from D.C.

The plaintiffs in the Boston challenge have come back with a new 14th Amendment lawsuit claiming the mid-litigation pivot to a different admissions scheme for the so-called exam schools, based on socioeconomic “tiers” instead of the original zip codes, has created the “disparate impact” result required by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals: underrepresentation.

“Now, by clustering most white students together in one ‘tier’ where they compete only against each other for Exam School seats, the current Tier System ‘succeeded’ in reducing the proportion of white students admitted to the Exam Schools below the group’s share of the applicant pool three years in a row,” the suit says.

Filed by the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence on behalf of dozens of parents of white and Asian-American students denied and seeking admission to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy and John D. O’Bryant School of Science and Mathematics, the lawsuit includes data on the composition of the applicant pool from a public records request.

“Because these students were denied admission to their Exam School of choice due to their race, court-ordered admission to those schools is the only remedy for this race-based harm,” and a permanent injunction on the tier system is the only remedy for future applicants, the suit says.

“Boston Public Schools cannot launder racial quotas through socioeconomic labels” in the tier system, said the coalition’s lawyer, Chris Kieser of the Pacific Legal Foundation. “The Equal Protection Clause forbids government discrimination, whether done openly or by proxy.”

The defendants, Boston School Committee and Superintendent Mary Skipper, on Tuesday got an extension of time to file an answer until Sept. 11. The district’s lawyers didn’t answer queries by Just the News, and a district spokesperson referred the query to another office, which did not respond.

Northern Virginia’s prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the subject of Justice Alito’s first fiery rebuke of his colleagues for tacitly allowing “intentional racial discrimination … so long as it is not too severe,” continues facing political and regulatory scrutiny for alleged discrimination against Asian Americans.

The U.S. Department of Education opened a civil rights probe of Fairfax County Public Schools this spring, from a referral by state Attorney General Jason Miyares, into its admissions policy adopted in 2020 that eliminated standardized testing and implemented a “holistic” evaluation process for TJ, as it’s known, that includes personal experiences.

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Entitled Virginia Superintendent Wants Security Guard To Protect Her From Criticism

T.S. Eliot claimed that “April is the cruelest month,” but in this homeschooling dad’s opinion, that dubious honor belongs to August. In one of the great ironies of modern American life, we choose to send our kids back to school amid the dog days of summer, a sweltering time that would be better spent at the community pool.

Back-to-school time is also an expensive proposition. The National Retail Federation claims that between new clothes and shoes, school supplies, and electronics, the average family will fork out over $850 this year to outfit their K-12 children. Teachers have it even worse; according to Adopt-A-Classroom, the average teacher spent almost $900 out of his own pocket to buy classroom supplies in the 2024-2025 school year.

But there’s at least one group that won’t need to make hard financial decisions this month: high-level educational bureaucrats. Take Dr. Michelle Reid, the superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS). Not only does her new contract give her a salary higher than that of the president of the United States, but she also gets a car allowance and is currently seeking a taxpayer-funded “executive protection agent” to shield her from the peasants she supposedly serves. “Queen Reid” embodies the entitled mindset of an educational establishment that refuses to learn from its mistakes.

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Several Texas school staff members, including superintendent, charged after video captures horrific abuse of special needs children

Earlier this year, Millsap Independent School District in Parker County, Texas, faced a federal lawsuit after allegations surfaced that two staff members — special education teacher Jennifer Dale and paraprofessional Paxton Bean — abused special needs students. The pair have been charged with official oppression; Bean was also hit with an additional felony charge of injury to a child. Millsap ISD Superintendent Mari “Edie” Martin was charged with failure to report and intent to conceal the abuse allegations.

The lawsuit alleges that Dale and Bean physically abused special needs students, particularly a 10-year-old nonverbal autistic boy named Alex Cornelius. Video evidence shows Dale striking at Alex and Bean throwing an object at him, with additional claims of verbal and psychological abuse.

Martin is accused of attempting to cover up the abuse by failing to report it to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services or local law enforcement, as required by law. Martin also reportedly instructed a witness to destroy evidence.

Dale, Bean, and Martin were arrested, indicted, and fired from Millsap ISD. Three other educators, Jami Riggs, Jeannie Bottorff, and Shannon Krause, were also indicted on misdemeanor charges for failure to report child abuse by a professional.

When Sara Gonzales, BlazeTV host of “Come and Take It,” heard the story, all she could think was, “If this had happened to my kid, I would be in jail right now.”

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Masking Our Schoolchildren Was Child Abuse – A Rare Chance To Stop It Returning

While more and more people are becoming aware that masking healthy people is both ineffective and harmful – as illustrated by the current rarity of face coverings in community settings – pockets of pro-mask zealotry remain smouldering in certain sections of our society, constituting an ongoing risk of re-ignition in the future.

Health and social care is one such example – a hazard addressed in Smile Free’s recent film, Masking Humanity.

Another is our education system, where, for prolonged periods during the Covid event, headmasters and teachers cruelly muzzled our kids in schools.

Now, as a result of the sterling endeavours of the ‘Declaration of Dumfries’ (DoD) team – a fellowship of people promoting common law principles of truth, rights and sovereignty – a rare opportunity has arisen to land a telling blow against those in authority and thereby deter any future imposition of masks on our schoolchildren.

In brief, what the ‘Declaration of Dumfries’ (DoD) people have accomplished is to force a local council to explicitly admit that they never had the authority to mask children, nor to punish pupils for non-compliance. 

By doing so, there is now an opening for parents of children who were victims of the unlawful mask impositions during the Covid event to sue their local councils and, by doing so, land a blow that will ensure that those in positions of power within our education system think twice before ever pulling such a stunt on our nation’s children again. 

To achieve this victory required 17 months of dogged determination and persistence.

The sequence of events is detailed in a DoD flowchart.

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The Alarming Problem in U.S. Schools That Isn’t Going Away

Chronic absenteeism in U.S. schools surged during the pandemic and remains alarmingly high, with millions of students continuing to miss weeks of class each year. Despite efforts to reverse the trend, the problem shows no sign of going away quickly.

Key Facts:

  • Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of school in a year.
  • The rate peaked at 31% in 2021–22 and has only dropped to 19.3% by 2025.
  • Washington, D.C., Oregon, Hawaii, and New Mexico report the worst attendance rates, some nearing 50%.
  • Low-income students, English learners, and students with disabilities are disproportionately affected.
  • Some districts are paying students to attend school or adjusting schedules and tech use to address the issue.

The Rest of The Story:

Despite falling from pandemic highs, chronic absenteeism remains about 50% higher than it was before COVID-19.

A recent study from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) found that students continue to miss school more often and for longer stretches.

As of March 2025, the national average sits at 19.3%. Efforts to curb the trend vary. Districts like Detroit spend up to $1,000 per student annually to boost attendance.

Others tie attendance to grades or restrict online assignment flexibility. In some areas, schools delay start times or try disabling district devices at night to improve sleep and reduce distractions.

“We can pour all the money into schools and teachers, but if kids aren’t showing up, it’s not helping,” pediatrician Mary Beth Miotto told the Boston Globe, calling for school attendance to be treated like a “vital sign” by doctors.

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