Tag: public schools

NY Teacher Who ‘Prefers’ Underage Girls Hid Disturbing Content in Secret Application on Phone

A New York educator has been apprehended for his alleged involvement in child exploitation.

Kostas Fekkas, 34, was employed at a Manhattan charter school at the time of his arrest on September 14. His teaching career also spans several other schools in the Bronx and neighboring Westchester County.

Court documents reveal that Fekkas communicated with an undercover Homeland Security Investigations agent, who was posing as a 13-year-old girl. During this interaction, Fekkas allegedly stated his preference for underage girls and even claimed to have had sexual relations with a 10th grader.

“Cool. I usually cut off at 9th grade but you’re insanely gorgeous,” Fekkas allegedly told the undercover agent, who identified herself as an 8th grader. Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was unequivocal in his condemnation.

“Kostas Fekkas’s alleged conduct is despicable,” Williams said. “As a teacher, Fekkas was entrusted with the care and well-being of children, who he in turn allegedly sought to victimize.”

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Fury as ZERO children at 13 Baltimore state schools pass math exam – as parent groups call on leaders to step down

A slate of Baltimore schools have sparked outrage after zero students passed their state math exams – with almost 75 percent testing at the lowest possible score.

The poor performances came in the latest round of Maryland‘s state testing, where 13 high schools in the city – a staggering 40 percent – failed to produce a single student with a ‘proficient’ score in math.

‘This is educational homicide,’ said Jason Rodriguez, deputy director of Baltimore-based nonprofit People Empowered by the Struggle, to Fox Baltimore.

The activist said there is ‘no excuse’ for the failure, which has come after years of warnings over the city’s poor education standards.

It also comes days after a scathing new study found that schooling across America fell to dire lows during the pandemic, concluding that one-third of fourth and eighth grade students can’t even read at a ‘basic’ level.  

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Author Responds to Sen Kennedy’s Viral Reading of ‘Gender Queer:’ ‘I Don’t Recommend This Book for Kids’

“Gender Queer” author Maia Kobabe reacted to a Republican senator reading a sexually explicit passage from the book during a Senate hearing, saying that the book it isn’t recommended for “kids.”

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., read from several explicit books found in public schools around the country last Tuesday. One of the titles was Kobabe’s “Gender Queer,” a graphic novel that has caused controversy among parents and criticized for its depictions of sex acts as well as discussions of masturbation. It was the most banned book in 2021, according to the American Library Association.

Kennedy read one explicit passage from “Gender Queer” at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that went viral. Kobabe reacted to Kennedy’s reading in an interview with the Washington Post Thursday.

“I have seen the clip. Another trans-activist friend texted it to me with a very ‘Congratulations, and also I’m sorry’ attitude,” Kobabe said.

“[T]he point of the comics was initially to be a tool to help me come out to my own family. A way to say: ‘This is what I’m talking about when I talk about gender. The pronouns are the tip of the iceberg,” Kobabe, who uses “e/em/eir” pronouns, said.

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Police report reveals Rocky River intermediate school principal’s text conversations about sex, drugs, and alcohol with kids as young as 17

Shocking details have been revealed as part of the investigation into the Rocky River School District principal who was placed on administrative leave in June after a complaint was filed by the parent of a former high school student. 

Dr. Heath Horton continues to be on leave from his post as Kensington Intermediate School principal and is barred from school district properties during the investigation. 

Earlier this week, the Rocky River Police Department released a redacted 66-page report detailing a long series of text messages between the 42-year-old Horton and 17 former students with ages ranging from 17 to 23. In those messages, Horton said “we can never share our relationship through education.” He said he had to be viewed “as their uncle or family friend.”

From June 27, 2022 to May 11, 2023, Horton sends several text messages to a male asking for sexual videos. One interaction outlined in the report has Horton saying, “Don’t tease me with a three-second video. I want a longer video.” He adds, “Get me a good nut on face or ass vid/pic.”

The report also mentions a “Boom Room,” described as an extra bedroom at Horton’s house. Horton allegedly brought former students to his house, including minors, to drink alcohol and smoke cigars. In several text messages, Horton is seen propositioning people to “visit the Boom.”

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Chicago Teachers Union Boss Sends Son to Private School

The head of the Chicago Teachers Union who has described school choice as “the choice of racists” sends her son to a private school. 

Stacy Davis Gates, who was elected as president of the Chicago Teachers Union in 2022, has long derided school choice—a wide range of policies that make it easier for parents to send their children to schools other than their local public school, often by getting back some of the government funding that would have followed their child to public school—as inherently racist.

“*School choice* was actually the choice of racists,” Gates tweeted in August 2022. “It was created to avoid integrating schools with Black children. Now it’s the civil rights struggle of our generation?”

In a letter she wrote earlier this month, Gates explained her decision to enroll her son in a private school while her other two children remained in Chicago Public Schools (CPS).

Chicago classrooms are “struggling to recover from waves of school closings and disinvestment under previous mayors. Public and charter high schools in our Black and Brown neighborhoods are living and breathing examples of inequality,” she wrote. “For my husband and me, it forced us to send our son, after years of attending a public school, to a private high school so he could live out his dream of being a soccer player while also having a curriculum that can meet his social and emotional needs.”

This excuse misses key context. While Gates is right that school systems across the nation, including in Chicago, are still reeling from pandemic-era setbacks, she herself led the charge to keep Chicago Public Schools closed sporadically as late as early 2022. When CPS announced a two-week shutdown in January 2022, Gates told The New York Times that the closure was necessary for schools to “get themselves together.”

Gates also frames CPS as underfunded, describing “decades of systemic underinvestment in marginalized communities.” However, over the past five academic years, CPS’ operating budget has actually skyrocketed—increasing from $5.92 billion to $8.49 billion, despite enrollment dropping by nearly 40,000 students over the same period. 

Further, in consistently framing school choice advocates as racist, Gates also ignores the fact that minority parents are often the strongest supporters of school choice. According to a RealClear Opinion Research poll from earlier this summer, 73 percent of black respondents supported school choice, the highest of any demographic group. At least 70 percent of other demographic groups also support school choice policies.

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Texas school suspends Black student more than two weeks for purportedly lengthy dreadlocks

Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, Texas punished a Black student named Darryl George with more than two weeks of in-school suspension — for having dreadlocks.

“School officials said his dreadlocks fell below his eyebrows and ear lobes and violated the district’s dress code,” reported Cheyanne Mumphrey and Juan Lozano for the Associated Press. “George, 17, has been suspended since Aug. 31 at the Houston-area school. He was in tears when he was suspended Monday despite his family’s arguments that his hair does not violate the dress code, his mother Darresha George said.”

“He has to sit on a stool for eight hours in a cubicle,” the mother told the AP. “That’s very uncomfortable. Every day he’d come home, he’d say his back hurts because he has to sit on a stool.” She added that her son has grown dreadlocks for over 10 years and the family has never been harassed or received complaints about it until now.

This incident comes just as Texas enacted its own state version of the CROWN Act, a law that prohibits discrimination based on various racially-associated hairstyles like dreadlocks, braids, or Afros. The Georges pointed out the new law to school officials, but the principal and vice principal reportedly said that the law does not protect the length of hair.

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‘Empty shelves with absolutely no books’: Students, parents question school board’s library weeding process

Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

Those are all examples of books Reina Takata says she can no longer find in her public high school library in Mississauga, Ont., which she visits on her lunch hour most days.

In May, Takata says the shelves at Erindale Secondary School were full of books, but she noticed that they had gradually started to disappear. When she returned to school this fall, things were more stark.

“This year, I came into my school library and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books,” said Takata, who started Grade 10 last week. 

She estimates more than 50 per cent of her school’s library books are gone. 

In the spring, Takata says students were told by staff that “if the shelves look emptier right now it’s because we have to remove all books [published] prior to 2008.” 

Takata is one of several Peel District School Board (PDSB) students, parents and community members CBC Toronto spoke to who are concerned about a seemingly inconsistent approach to a new equity-based book weeding process implemented by the board last spring in response to a provincial directive from the Minister of Education. 

They say the new process, intended to ensure library books are inclusive, appears to have led some schools to remove thousands of books solely because they were published in 2008 or earlier.

Parents and students are looking for answers as to why this happened, and what the board plans to do moving forward.

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Triggered: Woke Alabama School Suspends 6-Year-Old Over ‘Finger Guns’ During Cops And Robbers Game

A six-year-old Alabama boy was suspended from school and had his “permanent record” threatened for making ‘finger guns’ during a game of cops and robbers.

“They labeled my six-year-old as a potentially violent and dangerous student because he was being a little boy and playing cops and robbers with another student (who was also suspended) and using his fingers like a gun,” said the boy’s father, Jarrod Belcher, in a statement released on Friday, Sept. 8.

According to the Epoch Times, a Jefferson County Board of Education “Due Process Referral for Class III Infractions” form released by Gun Owners of America (GOA) reads that Belcher’s son was “using gun fingers to shoot at another student.”

The boy was subsequently suspended from school pending a hearing with his parents.

According to the letter, on Sept. 1, 2023, two boys were playing “cops and robbers” during recess at Bagley Elementary School.

“During the course of their play, the children reportedly extended their index fingers and thumbs and said ‘bang-bang’ at each other,” the letter reads.

The child, identified as J.B., was suspended and accused of committing a Class III infraction. This is the district’s most serious infraction. According to the Jefferson County School District’s Student Parent Handbook, Class III infractions include possession of guns or explosives, sexual battery, battery of a school district employee, and robbery, among others.

The boy would only be allowed back in school after a hearing with his parents and the district. -Epoch Times

Following a complaint from the Belchers, the disciplinary action was downgraded to a less severe Class II infraction, however Belcher is still calling BS.

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These Schools Across the US Have Brought Back Mask Mandates

Amid a small increase in COVID-19 hospital admissions in recent days, a handful of schools and colleges across the United States have re-imposed mask mandates—or at least started recommending them.

In the most recent example, a school in Montgomery County, Maryland, announced it would mandate masking for at least 10 days after three students tested positive for the virus in one classroom. The masking rule applies to students, teachers, and other staff in the classroom, it said.

A letter posted by the  Rosemary Hills School online said that KN95 masks have been distributed to students and teachers in the classroom. At-home rapid testing kits were also sent home.

“Additional KN95 masks have been distributed and students and staff in identified classes or activities will be required to mask while in school for the next 10 days, except while eating or drinking,” Principal Rebecca Irwin Kennedy said in a letter, dated Sept. 5.

The re-imposition of mandates is being done “to keep our school environment as safe as possible for in-person teaching and learning, and to prevent further transmission of COVID-19 in this group,” she continued.

The Montgomery County school district policy says that masks are optional, with some exceptions, according to a message viewed by local station WTOP-TV. The district said that in certain instances, “masks may be recommended or required.”

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North Texas Educator Charged with Sex Crimes Against Multiple Students

A North Texas educator has been accused of sex crimes involving multiple students.

The Arlington Police Department arrested Anthony Rashad Hawkins, 25, on Tuesday in Grand Prairie.

Police say Hawkins is a former employee of Sam Houston High School in Arlington Independent School District.

Hawkins was charged with three counts of improper relationship between educator and student—forcible rape and two counts of indecency with a child by sexual contact. All are second-degree felonies punishable by two to 20 years in prison.

According to Arlington police, detectives with APD’s Crimes Against Children Unit initiated an investigation on August 23, after school administrators were made aware of the allegations and immediately reported them to authorities.

Through the course of their investigation, detectives identified three victims.

Hawkins was booked into the Arlington City Jail on September 5 and released on a $100,000 bond ($20,000 for each offense).

State records show that Hawkins does not hold a Texas teaching certificate.

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