Tag: public schools

Fifth-grader, 11, speaks out after school banned her from starting interfaith prayer club due to ‘lack of funding’ just weeks after approving LGBTQ Pride group

A fifth grader from Washington State who wanted to start an interfaith prayer club at school because ‘she felt alone’ is speaking out after her request was denied.

Laura Toney, who is 11 and attends Creekside Elementary School in Sammamish, east of Seattle, had hoped to start the on-campus club to bring together students of different faith backgrounds to ‘serve their community’.

But her pitch to start such a club was rejected despite a Pride Club being approved only weeks earlier.

‘I wanted to start it because I felt kind of alone in the classroom and at school and so I realized I had some friends and I knew some other people that felt the same way and so I talked to them and I was just like you know what it would be a great idea to make a club where people could come together and do good in the community,’ Laura told Fox News.

 The school is now being accused of violating the young student’s First Amendment’s religious freedom protections by denying her request.

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Texas High School Cosmetology Teacher, Son Accused of Child Trafficking

A Texas high school cosmetology teacher and her son are accused of child sex trafficking and compelling prostitution, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. 

Kedria Grigsby, 42, a cosmetology teacher at Klein Cain High School, was arrested Monday, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said in a post to X. Her son, Roger Magee, 21, was arrested in November 2022 for trafficking and prostitution.

Grigsby is facing charges for three counts of trafficking a child and three counts of compelling prostitution of juveniles. Gonzalez said there are at least three victims in the case, including a 15-year-old, 16-year-old, and 17-year-old who were reported runaways. He said he believes Grigsby “assisted her son,” who is still in jail. 

“It appears Grigsby recruited troubled juveniles from local high schools by offering them a place to stay, which would be a hotel,” Gonzalez said. “Additional teen victims have come forward stating that Grigsby was also attempting to recruit them while attending school.”

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Governor poised to sign law making kids watch animated fetal videos from anti-abortion group

In Tennessee, whether parents like it or not, Republican Gov. Bill Lee is poised to sign a law that will make public school children watch an animated video on fetal development backed by an anti-abortion group, or some equivalent of it, after lawmakers in the state vaulted the legislation to passage.

The law, known as the Baby Olivia Act, first passed in the state’s House in March on a 67-23 vote and then sailed through the Senate last week, 21-6. The roughly three-minute animation created by the nonprofit anti-abortion group Live Action bills itself as a “Never Before Seen Look at Human Life in the Womb” and would be shown to public school children as part of the state’s family health curriculum.

Among other features in the video, it depicts sperm fertilizing an ovum and it is here that it declares: “This is the moment that life begins. A new human being has come into existence.” The animated video states that a fetus can recognize lullabies in the womb and depicts a purported fetus at 27 weeks gazing through a translucent womb while pressing its fingers against it. The shadow of the mother’s fingers press back.

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Fury over Seattle’s axing of gifted and talented schools for having too many white students grows, as unearthed footage shows weeping black mom begging board to keep them, before bully member forces audience to listen to poem to mark his birthday

Anger over Seattle’s decision to close its schools for gifted and talented students has grown – as newly-unearthed footage showed shocking behavior from the board who made the decision. 

Last month’s announcement that the Highly Capable Cohort (HCC) schools would shutter because they have too many white and Asian students enraged parents who say bright but disadvantaged children of all races will now suffer.

Kiley Riffell, whose two daughters attend HCC school Cascadia Elementary, said: ‘SPS is scrapping all HC programming and replacing it with empty promises, zero plan, and zero funding. I’m sad to watch so many families leave the public school system, but I can’t blame them.’

Eric Feeny told Fox13: ‘Until you have a better system, don’t give out a fake system or half solution’ 

Teachers will now be forced to manage classes of 30 children of mixed abilities at the same time, without additional resources or funding. The HCC schools, which are targeted at the top two percent of students, are now being aggressively phased out and will be gone completely by 2024. 

And newly-unearthed footage of the board behind the decision displayed behavior that will further concern parents, with two of the most vocal ringleaders since disgraced by bullying accusations.

During the January 2020 meeting, a high-achieving black tech leader and mom called Sara Jones, who flourished after attending a HCC, wept as she begged the board to keep the schools. 

‘It breaks my heart that little boys and girls like me may not get the opportunity that I did,’ she told the board, in remarks first reported by the Seattle Stranger.

Other parents of all ethnicities made similar pleas – only to be sharply cut-off by former board member Zachary DeWolf after their allotted time ran out. 

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Australian high school class explicitly explains bestiality as part of LGBTQ lessons

A high school in Australia is under investigation by the South Australia Department for Education after it hosted an unsupervised presentation for young girls that explicitly explained bestiality as part of a sex ed lesson about LGBTQ+.

Renmark High School’s principal, Mat Evans, issued a letter of apology to parents who heard that their children left in disgust during the session on March 22 given by a third-party presenter and put on by Headspace Berri.

The apology read that the school was “taking this matter very seriously” and had “raised concerns” with the speaker from Headspace located in Berri who has been suspended from operating in government schools while the Education Department investigates, per The Advertiser.

Evans also stated the school had launched an internal review due to the normal procedure of “notifying parents of specific presentations was not followed.”

“I apologise unreservedly for that,” he said in the letter sent on March 25.

“I acknowledge that some of the students felt uncomfortable with this content, and there have been a number of complaints from parents,” he said.

“I’d like to thank those parents for raising these concerns with me directly and apologise to those families.”

He said that the internal review would “ensure that processes around such notifications, and procedures with regard to third parties attending at our school are always met in future.”

Horrified parents learned that their daughters in year 9 at the school had been pulled from their regular lessons and placed in a separate classroom with the Headspace Berri facilitators and the speaker without the supervision of a teacher. They had not been notified of the presentation or had consented to it.

“We had a teacher that told us to grab a chair and sit in front of the board, and then the Headspace people came in and then [the teacher] left, so then we’re sitting in front of a board alone with no teachers, just the Headspace people,” 14-year-old student Courtney White said, according to Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The title slide of the presentation read “You can see queerly now. Now point in hiding.” 

14-year-old Emelia Wunderberg said all the girls felt extremely “uncomfortable” as the presenter went into graphic detail about their sexuality and then showed a slide about what each component in “LGBTQIA+” meant.

“There was a slide for what the ‘plus’ means, and they just started randomly saying words that no-one knew, like bestiality,” Emelia said. “They said [the queer community] just accepts all of it, even though … isn’t it illegal?”

“We’re all just sitting there like, ‘What the hell? What are we doing here? Why are we learning about animals having sex with humans?'” she said.

“It was really disgusting, it was really uncomfortable.”

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The Great Escape from Government Schools?

After enduring bullshit school shutdowns during the COVID pandemic, many students concluded that school itself must be bullshit and have skipped attending classes. Government bureaucrats are panicking since subsidies are tied to the number of students’ butts in chairs each day. Duke University Professor Katie Rosanbalm lamented that, thanks to the pandemic, “Our relationship with school became optional.”

School absences have “exploded” almost everywhere, according to a New York Times report last week. Chronic absenteeism has almost doubled amongst public school students, rising from 15% pre-pandemic to 26% currently. Compulsory attendance laws are getting trampled far and wide.

The New York Times suggested that “something fundamental has shifted in American childhood and the culture of school, in ways that may be long lasting.” Connecticut Education Commissioner Charlene M. Russell-Tucker commented, “There is a sense of: ‘If I don’t show up, would people even miss the fact that I’m not there?’” The arbitrary, counterproductive school shutdowns destroyed the trust that many families had in the government education system.

The New York Times reflected the tizzy afflicting education bureaucrats across the land: “Students can’t learn if they aren’t in school.”

Like hell.

So kids are not enduring daily indoctrination to doubt their own genders? So kids’ heads are not being dunked into the latest social justice buckets of fear, loathing, and guilt? So kids are not being drilled with faulty methods of learning mathematics to satisfy the latest Common Core catechism and vainly try to close the “achievement gap”? A shortage of indoctrination is not the same as a shortfall of education.

More than seventy years ago, University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins aptly observed, “The tremendous waste of time in the American education system must result from the fact that there is so much time to waste.” John Taylor Gatto, New York’s Teacher of the Year of 1991 (according to the New York State Education Department), observed, “Government schooling…kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.”

My view on school absenteeism is shaped by my dissident tendencies. Government schooling was the most brain deadening experience in my life. Early in elementary school, I relished reading even more than peanut butter. But I was obliged to put down books and listen to teachers, slowing my mental intake by 80% or 90%. By the time I reached fourth grade, my curiosity was fading.

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Seattle Is Getting Rid of Gifted Schools in a Bid To Increase Equity

Seattle is getting rid of its specialized public schools in an effort to increase racial equity. Ironically, this decision may end up hurting the very students the policy change is intended to help.

In 2021, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) moved to phase out its “highly capable cohort schools.” The district had three elementary schools, five middle schools, and three high schools devoted to teaching students at an accelerated pace. The district plans to finish phasing out the specialized schools by the 2027–28 school year. The reasons behind the change are rooted in the disproportionate number of white and Asian students in the program.

“The Seattle community and our families began to demonstrate discomfort with the racial gap disparity in classrooms and in schools now affiliated with” the advanced schools, reads a 2020 SPS task force report, which recommended doing away with the accelerated program. “Our current data regarding students receiving services who are identified as highly capable is disproportionate to the student populations who attend our school classrooms each day….Current practices must be interrupted and an authentic examination of our commitments and priorities must occur.”

School officials say that gifted students will still get specialized instruction through the “highly capable neighborhood” model it plans to start next school year. However, a recent story from The Seattle Times sheds doubt on Seattle’s ability to make good on this promise.

“SPS is offering a whole-classroom model where all students are in the same classroom and the teacher individualizes learning plans for each student,” writes reporter Claire Bryan. “Teachers won’t necessarily have additional staff in the classroom; the district is working to provide teachers with curriculum and instruction on how to make it work.”

The idea that teachers have the extra time to craft individual instruction for each student in a classroom with a wide range of ability levels is obviously far-fetched.

“You can only do so much differentiation,” Karen Stukovsky, a parent with three children in highly capable cohort schools, told the Times. She added that one principal told her, “You have some kids who can barely read and some kids who are reading ‘Harry Potter’ in first grade or kindergarten. How are you going to not only get those kids up to grade level and also challenge those kids who are already way above grade level?”

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DARE Didn’t Make Kids ‘Say No’ to Drugs. It Normalized Police in Schools.

There’s no such thing as a universal millennial experience, but DARE comes close.

Starting in 1983, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program sent police officers into classrooms to teach fifth- and sixth-graders about the dangers of drugs and the need, as Nancy Reagan famously put it, to “just say no.” DARE embraced an abstinence-only model in which any use of alcohol or drugs qualified as abuse and the only acceptable tactic was to abstain. Upon completing the 17-week program, students received a certificate and a T-shirt.

At its height, over 75 percent of American schools participated in the program, costing taxpayers as much as $750 million per year. Historian Max Felker-Kantor revisits DARE and its legacy in DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools, a new history of the program.

As a DARE graduate myself who wore the T-shirt long after it was fashionable (look, I liked the austere black-and-red color scheme), I vaguely recall presentations given by someone from the local police department. On one occasion, he told a student to act drunk and pretend to offer the class beer, while the rest of us screamed at her in reply. Another time, our officer-instructor went on a tangent about how “girls are just tougher these days,” before presumably tying it back to why it was imperative that we 10- and 11-year-olds resist any entreaties to shoot up heroin in our rural Georgia schoolyard. I recently learned to my horror that my wife won a poetry contest in her DARE program in Alaska—a poem that she then, mortified, had to read aloud during the DARE graduation ceremony.

In hindsight, DARE is primarily remembered as a joke, a bunch of cops acting out hokey anti-drug skits. By 1994, a decade after the program’s founding, studies clearly indicated that the DARE curriculum had little to no effect on rates of youth drug use. By the 2010s, it had become a popular source of irony and parody: When then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the program’s effectiveness in 2017, DARE graduates noted on social media how they still smoke pot in their black-and-red shirts.

But while DARE didn’t “work” in the sense of keeping many kids from using drugs, Felker-Kantor argues the program was wildly successful at normalizing the presence of police, and the war on drugs, in people’s everyday lives.

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Pastor Removed From Meeting By Police For Reading Pornographic Book Available In School Library

A pastor who has made it his mission to expose sexually graphic material that is being made available in schools was forcibly removed from a high school in Midland, Texas by police officers Tuesday after reading aloud explicit passages from a book available to children in the library there.

Pastor John K. Amanchukwu Sr. read aloud passages from for around three minutes from a 1996 book titled PUSH by American author Sapphire before his mic was cut, he was asked to leave by administrators, and escorted out by five police officers.

As you can hear, the book contains graphic descriptions of child rape that are patently unsuitable for high school kids to read.

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Student Makes His ENTIRE Truck A US Flag After School Told Him Not To Fly One

After a student in Indiana was ordered by his high school not to fly a US flag on his pickup truck, he responded by wrapping the entire vehicle in a US flag design.

As reported by Fox 19, Cameron Blasek, a senior at East Central High School in St. Leon, Ind., was told by school administrators that the flag he was flying on his truck broke the rules and had to be taken down.

Blasek challenged the ruling and got it overturned, because you can’t order Americans not to fly the national flag in their own country.

Dozens of other students also flew American flags on their vehicles in protest of the school’s stance, and the story went viral, forcing administrators to back down.

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