High School Student Suspended for Posing With Pro-Trump MAGA Flag and Sweatshirt

Last Friday, Perry High School in Gilbert, Ariz., suspended student Logan Jones after a security officer reprimanded her as she posed for photos in a "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) sweater while holding a pro-Trump "Make America Great Again" flag. On Wednesday, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) sent a demand letter warning of legal action unless the school dropped the suspension. The school agreed to allow Jones to return to school that day but it refused to remove the suspension from her record.

"Public schools have a duty to respect the legitimate free expression of students that the First Amendment guarantees to them," Tyson Langhofer, ADF senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom, wrote in a statement Thursday. "While it’s good that the school is allowing Logan to return to school, it isn’t acceptable that this unjust suspension will remain on her record."

ADF will not accept this state of affairs. "As we continue discussions with the school, we are also consulting with Logan and her mother to determine what our next steps will be if the school doesn’t do the right thing and remove the suspension," Langhofer added.

According to the demand letter, Jones and her friends had dressed in patriotic and USA-themed clothing for a "Party in the USA Day" on Friday of Spirit Week.

"Immediately after school was dismissed at 2:14 p.m., [Jones] and a few of her friends went to one of the outdoor common areas of campus to take pictures together before they went home," the letter reads. "This is a common practice for [Jones] and many other students and it happens virtually every day after school without any interference by school officials.

Less than five minutes after they arrived, while [Jones] and her friend were taking a picture in their MAGA sweatshirts and holding a flag that said 'Trump' and 'Make America Great Again,' a School Resource Officer approached and ordered [Jones] and her friends to leave."

Jones immediately obeyed and started packing up to leave. The officer took photos of her and her friends with his phone, began following her as she left campus, and then ordered her to give him her name. Jones asked why he needed her name, as she was complying with his order. At that point, the officer told her to speak with Vice Principal Heather Patterson.

Jones called her mother and told her about the situation. Her mother said she would come to the school herself and told Jones not to speak with anyone until she arrived. At the office, Jones was again asked to give her name. She "politely replied that her mother was on her way to the office and that her mother had instructed her not to answer any questions until she arrived."

Once the mother arrived, a brief discussion ensued between the mother, Principal Dan Serrano, Vice Principal Patterson, and the officer. Principal Serrano left, saying, "I am tired of hearing this. Logan Jones, you are suspended for 10 days. Get off of school property."

Jones was allegedly suspended for failing to identify herself to school officials, yet ADF argued that "this reason was mere pretext."

"Contrary to the stated reason, there is ample evidence to establish that you imposed the suspension against [Jones] based on a disagreement with the viewpoint of [Jones's] message," the letter states. "Multiple videos demonstrate the hostility that School officials displayed towards the messages expressing support for President Trump and his MAGA slogan. And it is our understanding that other students have been punished as well for expressing similar viewpoints."

"This blatant censorship of [Jones's] speech violates the First Amendment," the letter declares.

In dropping the suspension, the school seems to have recognized that punishing Jones for her pro-Trump and MAGA demonstration was a violation of her free speech. Even so, the school reportedly is refusing to drop the suspension from the girl's record.

No school should suspend a student for expressing a political viewpoint. Sadly, many liberals have stigmatized Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan as hateful, and it appears these school officials consider MAGA unacceptable. This school should have learned from the backlash and lawsuits after the media ran with the story that the MAGA hat-wearing Covington High School boys were haters.

The school's action violates the First Amendment. Students have the right to wear MAGA sweaters and hold Trump flags. This is outrageous.

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New California Bill Would Turn College Health Centers Into Abortion Clinics

The California state Senate Education Committee recently approved Senate Bill 24, known as the College Student Right to Access Act.

The bill would add a new chapter to state education code to require student health care clinics at all 34 California public colleges and universities to “offer abortion by medication techniques”—aka “the abortion pill”—starting on Jan. 1, 2023.

A similar bill, SB 320, was put forward last year by the same state senator, Connie Leyva, D-Chino. Thankfully, it was vetoed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a fellow Democrat, who saw the mandate as “unnecessary” since “the services required by this bill are widely available off-campus.”

In his veto statement, Brown said that “according to a study sponsored by supporters of this legislation, the average distance to abortion providers in campus communities varies from five to seven miles, not an unreasonable distance.”

The study he was referring to was commissioned by the University of California at San Francisco, which supports the campus abortion mandate. That only shows how college campuses are targeted by the abortion industry.

SB 24 and last year’s SB 320 are similar, but SB 24 includes new grant amounts and deadlines for implementation, as well as language that would allow “contracted external agency” personnel to administer chemical abortions in student health centers.

In other words, the public university system in California could begin contracting with Planned Parenthood to send its abortionists into student health centers to administer chemical abortions.

That means Leyva and the other sponsors of the bill made no effort to address serious flaws with this type of mandate, raised by both sides of the debate. Even the universities themselves are apprehensive. Putting the abortion business on campus does not meet a need, but places considerable liabilities on the colleges.

To bring this bill up a second time without addressing its many serious flaws shows a reckless disregard for the 400,000 young women on those 34 public campuses.

You can imagine what potential risks and liabilities would come with forcing colleges to dispense the abortion pill.

Foremost among the many concerns about SB 24 is its vague funding language.

Like its failed predecessor, SB 24 would allow the $10.2 million in private funds to cover costs associated with the purchase of new equipment, facility upgrades, staff training, and other costs associated with making student health clinics ready to administer chemical abortions.

Also, as with SB 320, SB 24’s funding mechanism is vague and leaves open the possibility of taxpayer-funded abortion after 2023.

It provides no safeguards to prohibit state funds or student fees from paying for the ongoing support of the program. Public funding of abortion is something we know that a majority of Americans strongly oppose, yet SB 24 takes no precautions to prevent that. Not saying “no” is effectively saying “yes.”

Furthermore, the legislation offers no maternal assistance for women who choose not to abort. It supports abortions only. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that more than one-quarter of all undergraduate students are raising dependent children—yet no assistance is offered for them.

Parenthood and education are compatible, and there are plenty of women who can prove that. A bill that purposely goes out of its way to take away women’s children, rather than help them raise their babies and continue their education, is a slap in the face to “women’s empowerment.”

“Abortion by medication techniques,” as the legislation calls it, involves early-stage chemical abortions via the abortion pill, but it can still be quite traumatic. What makes chemical abortions different from surgical abortions is that the mother has to see and dispose of the remains of the aborted child herself.

One can imagine the mental trauma that would occur to a young woman whose abortion takes place in her college dorm room or in a student health center bathroom. Is that really a good thing for a young college woman?

But legislation like SB 24 couldn’t care less about women. It only cares about expanding the business of abortion.

Abortion proponents, however, view such a mandate as model legislation for other states to follow, and California is vying to be the first state to implement it.

The California state Senate Health Committee first passed the bill on a 7-3 vote, and it has now passed out of the Senate Education Committee. The next stop is the Committee on Appropriations, which is set to meet next week.

Brown’s successor, Gov. Gavin Newsom, has already insinuated his support for the bill, and that has only encouraged supporters of SB 24. However, it’s still not known how much support will actually come from the public universities themselves, which remain apprehensive of the considerable liability that they would have to assume.

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Australia: Public education fiasco can be fixed by restoring power to parents

Public schooling has become an arena of mischief and failure, in which parents are powerless to influence what their children are taught.

The system cries out for reform. It is a policy issue of the first order, yet even on the verge of an election it receives no mention.

When children leave the classroom en masse to promote unproven views in the streets, the schools betray their educational commitment. And when those children return to their classroom, it is one of ideology (such as the notorious, Marx-inspired Safe Schools program), interrupted teaching and disorder instead of true instruction and objectivity — with pockets of excellence all too rare.

Evidence shows our public schools lag behind most of the advanced nations in promoting students’ skills and knowledge, while disruptive behaviour is common. The OECD remarks on findings from the Program for International Student Assessment that “Australia has a ‘problematic situation’ in terms of classroom discipline”.

Despite more and more money for schools, the Productivity Commission, in its National Education Evidence Base report, observes that student achievement shows “little improvement and in some areas standards have dropped”.

The loss is not just educational; it is also moral failure when the reasonable expectations of parents for their children’s education may be ignored.

Appropriate conduct under legitimate authority and discipline in the classroom have substantially disappeared, and the children’s loss is shared by their parents, who lack any serious capacity to intervene and help stem the decline.

Given that successful education of a child requires peace, discipline, commitment and respectful and responsible conduct by child and teacher, does the public schooling system provide the motivations and the management system that will achieve those ends?

If appropriate learning ought to be the supreme objective, the answer to that question must be a negative. Control and power in public schools are being directed to supporting the ideological interests and teachings of their staff, to the impotent dismay of parents. They may complain, but they lack any formal powers of intervention and control.

The public schools increasingly are concerning themselves with gender issues and political ideology, contrary to the wishes of many, if not most, parents. Public schooling has become answerable only to itself. For several generations such schooling has steadily evolved to this condition with relatively little challenge.

The most far-reaching institutional and systematic abridgement of the power of families to shape the education, moralisation and socialisation of their children followed the introduction of universal and compulsory free education in the last third of the 19th century. Before then, providing for the education of children — like the provision of the no less important essentials of food and clothing — was in the hands of parents. They were assisted by subsidies, or what amounted to subsidies, from the state and the churches.

The state helped pay for education but did not provide it itself.

But, as the state steadily took over the provision of the free education, children and their parents fell into the hands of a single supplier and escape into the private system became very costly.

The public system therefore ­neutered the power of the parents’ purse to monitor, judge and influence what was happening to the education of their children. Reform would be possible if this power could be restored to parents.

Some would argue that education should be “value free”. Nevertheless, issues of value and virtue may arise in many school situations and it is vital that parents should be well informed and enabled to exercise power in deciding what is to be done.

The only effective source of that power is control of school fin­ancing. Governments are ostensibly the agents of parents’ school interests, but in practice governments have a conflicting interest as the producer or provider of schooling. The history of public education records that this conflict has usually been resolved in favour of producer interests to which the interests of parents and children have been sacrificed.

Teacher unions are the most powerful of these interests and they are frequently inimical to the interests of children and parents.

If progress is to be made, the present unhappy state of public education as a key institution should be prominent in public debate and subsequent action. A crucial object should be to endow parents with the power to control the financing of the public education of their children.

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