Male teacher ordered to observe teen girl in shower

A male physical-education teacher in a Florida school district has been told he will be transferred to another school as discipline for not doing his job.

His job? “Walk into and supervise the locker room.”

And why didn’t he? There possibly was a teen girl showering there with the boys in her class.

Chasco Middle School in Land O’ Lakes, Florida, has drawn the attention of the non-profit legal group Liberty Counsel for adopting the transgender activist agenda.

Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, said the Pasco County School Board must “reign in these rogue school employees and administrators and reject their unauthorized LGBT policies and practices that violate parental and employee rights and the privacy rights of students.”

Liberty Counsel has written a letter to Cynthia Armstrong, chairman of the Pasco County School District Board, in response to an unwritten “policy” that allowed a girl to use the boys bathroom and required “others to refer to her with false gender pronouns ‘he’ and ‘him.’

Liberty Counsel said the school’s two P.E. teachers, identified as Robert O. and Stephanie C., objected to administrators’ orders “to allow the girl into the bathroom, with no forewarning of the boys, or their parents, so that the boys could take steps to protect their privacy.”

“Administrators told them that informing the boys so they could take steps to protect their privacy would be ‘discriminatory,’ and subject them to discipline,” Liberty Counsel said.

“Robert also objected to administrators’ orders that he continue to walk into and supervise the locker room, despite a girl potentially being nude or undressed in that area. The administrators told him that the girl in question had ‘every right to use the locker room,’ including the right to disrobe in the open locker area, and shower in its open showers, where Robert is required to periodically walk in and supervise.”

Liberty Counsel declared to the district that Robert “will not knowingly place himself in a position to observe a minor female in the nude or otherwise in a state of undress.”

“Now, Robert has been told by administrators that he will be transferred to another school as discipline for ‘not doing your job in the locker room.'”

The legal group said the girl “was admitted to the boys locker room for the first time, and walked in, catching boys (literally) with their pants down, causing them embarrassment and concern by the fact that they had been observed changing by an obvious girl.”

“Boys immediately came out of the locker room, and approached Stephanie and Robert, seeking assistance. The P.E. teachers were powerless to respond, because administrators had placed a gag order on them, and told them that they could not answer the boys on these questions.”

A WND call to the district Wednesday afternoon got a message saying the office was closed. The call then was disconnected.

Liberty Counsel explained to the district that there is no law requiring that girls be allowed in boys’ restrooms. The group asserted “objective biological sex – male and female – is (and should remain) the determining factor for access to gender-appropriate public school facilities.”

Allowing otherwise is “violating male students’ and teachers’ rights.”

Liberty Counsel pointed out that the U.S. Supreme Court “has acknowledged the lawfulness of sex-based standards that flow from legitimate biological differences between the sexes.

“Even Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has stated, ‘Separate places to disrobe, sleep, perform personal bodily functions are permitted, in some situations required, by regard for individual privacy.'”

Liberty Counsel said it is prepared to help the school board if it returns to a gender-appropriate policy.

The actions apparently stem from a “Gender Support Plan” created by Jackie Jackson-Dean, a school psychologist.

Her plan, Liberty Counsel said, encourages “improper locker and bathroom access, the use of false gender pronouns, and withholding of information from parents.”

It was President Obama who instructed public schools to allow access to restrooms and showers based on gender identity. However, the Trump administration rescinded the guideline.


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How Affirmative Action Backfires on Minority Students, and Why Colleges Do It Anyway

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once recounted the time when his Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School was dismissed from nearly every law firm he considered.

The interviewers, believing him to be a beneficiary of Yale’s aggressive affirmative action policies, which de-emphasized LSAT scores and grades for black students, questioned him pointedly about his qualifications and “doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated,” Thomas wrote in his memoir.

According to Thomas, Yale’s affirmative action quotas had relaxed the standards for his race so much that his achievements were stigmatized and not acknowledged by high society.

After this experience, Thomas pasted a 15-cent sticker he got from a pack of cigarettes next to his Yale Law School degree, as an indication of the mistake he made going to Yale.

Perhaps he may have somewhat understated the value of his elite law school education. But he did not understate the underlying problem facing gifted young minority students like him, and which remains to this day: that our educational culture values surface-level diversity to the extent that it actually undermines the well-being of those who are supposed to benefit from it.

Stuart Taylor, author of “The Mismatch Effect,” writes that these racial balancing policies implemented at Harvard and other elite schools, while perhaps well-intentioned, can actually produce negative side effects on entire racial communities.

According to Taylor’s research, black students who are “mismatched,” i.e. admitted into schools where they would not be considered had the school adopted a race-blind policy, are more than twice as likely to be found in the bottom 20 percent of the school as whites.

Black law school graduates are four times as likely to fail bar exams as whites. They are less socially integrated on campus, and graduate at a lower rate than their white counterparts.

The bad news gets worse after graduation. A 2013 study by economist Doug Williams found that black law school graduates with similar credentials to their white counterparts nevertheless perform worse on the bar exam.

Even after limiting his study to only those law school graduates who actually took the bar exam, he discovered that black graduates were 31 percent less likely to pass the bar exam on the first try than white peers.

What happens when these students are matched into universities more concordant with their objective academic aptitudes? The science isn’t yet completely settled, but the initial evidence based on studies conducted in California (where racial preferences were outlawed in 1996) have been positive.

At the University of California, Los Angeles, while the number of black and Hispanic applicants admitted to UCLA went down overall after 1996, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to black and Hispanic students remained the same, suggesting a higher graduation rate.

The evidence, at the very least, doesn’t seem to suggest the destruction of black achievement in higher education prophesied by those who oppose California’s system.

If blacks and Hispanics do not benefit from racial preferences, then why do universities like Harvard continue to fiercely resist eliminating them from the way they conduct admissions?

Part of the reason is that diversity sells. Colleges care deeply about their brand and image, and one of the most effective ways to reach socially conscious prospective students’ (and their parents’) hearts and wallets is tout the surface-level diversity of their class.

Furthermore, many large grants — ever-more necessary to pad the lining of university endowments — take strong consideration of a university’s “commitment to diversity.” The most prestigious, such as the Mellon Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, specifically ask how universities “support its underrepresented populations.”

Surface-level diversity has become a money-making industry. Perhaps the greatest proof of this is the sharp increase in the hiring of diversity officers at major colleges across the United States. Diversity officers, responsible for maintaining certain diversity protocols on campus, are being hired in droves.

As just one example, the University of California, Berkeley’s diversity bureaucracy is already at 175 employees. Many of these diversity bureaucrats are paid like kings — the head diversity officer at the University of Michigan is paid $375,000 per year, according to The Economist.

There appears to be no limit to the amount that colleges are willing to spend to boost their surface-level diversity credentials.

At the same time, however, many of these administrators sincerely believe that what they are doing is right. It is necessary to racially balance the composition of our student body, so the logic goes, because a diverse class is a healthy one.

But these good intentions do not automatically translate into real-world success for minority students. In fact, they can stunt their careers, force them into less rigorous majors, and negatively impact their self-esteem.

When students are admitted to college for reasons other than their own merit, they will soon find themselves struggling to cope with expectations they were not prepared for. The school may score its diversity points, but minority students will often be ill-served.

Every college wants to brag about diversity. Until we reckon with the consequences of affirmative action, however, those boasts will ring hollow.

Minority students deserve to be served according to their merit rather than used as currency in the diversity game.

SOURCE 






Professor Arrested After Being Caught on Camera Stealing Republican Yard Signs

Political campaigns have always been a rough-and-tumble business, and there is nothing new about supporters of one candidate seeking to sabotage or undermine the efforts of an opposing candidate in various ways.

One of the most common methods of sabotage is destroying or stealing yard signs of an opponent to express their opposition and to stifle displays of public support from other voters.

But doing so is a crime in many parts of the country, and one liberal professor in New York just learned that lesson the hard way after being caught on camera stealing yard signs for Republican candidates from a random supporter’s yard.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that economics lecturer Laura Ebert, who currently works at the State University of New York at New Paltz, was arrested by police and charged with misdemeanor larceny after she removed yard signs for Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Marc Molinaro and Rep. John Faso.

A surveillance camera at the home of the Republican voter caught the moment that Ebert stopped her truck on the side of the road and exited the vehicle to approach the yard signs. She then ripped them both out of the ground and tossed them into the open bed of the truck before leaving the scene.

A Twitter user by the name of Lisa McMerica posted the footage to social media last week and tweeted, “My lawn signs for #NY19 @JohnFasoNy and @marcmolinaro we’re just stolen from my front lawn,” followed by an angry face emoji.

In follow-up tweets in the comments of that post, the woman revealed that her husband had filed a police report and turned over the footage to law enforcement, who were able to obtain the license plate number of the truck and track down the thief to arrest her. She also noted that the yard signs had been tossed into a random ditch along the side of a road.

The arresting officer wrote in a police report obtained by the Free Beacon, “Based off my observation of the security footage, I patrolled to the residence and made contact with Ms. Ebert and she was subsequently taken into custody for petit larceny.”

“Ms. Ebert stated that she was ‘sorry’ and that she had disposed of the signs,” the report added.

Campus Reform made contact with the sign-stealing SUNY lecturer, who reiterated her apology for her criminal actions and sought to explain her motives, though she also utilized the opportunity to try and disparage Republicans for the reaction her criminal behavior had received.

“I did it in a moment of weakness and high emotion,” Ebert told Campus Reform of her decision to steal the campaign signs.

“I meant no personal harm, and don’t know the person whose lawn the sign was on. I have family I love that support Trump, so I was after the sign, not the person,” she added.

“I have apologized and feel bad, but clearly the GOP is putting a big deal (of) spin on this,” Ebert said, implying that the criticism she had received from Republicans for her actions were not merited.

“Many signs have been taken and disfigured, which, while no excuse for my bad behavior, doesn’t warrant the death threats I have received on my email about it. Nor the smear campaign after me, including notifying my supervisor,” she added.

Campus Reform also reached out to SUNY New Paltz for comment on Ebert’s behavior, but did not receive a response prior to the publication of the article.

The Free Beacon noted that this particular theft of political yard signs for Republican candidates was but one of many similar instances during this election cycle.

Though the punishment for misdemeanor larceny probably isn’t all that severe — and it is unlikely the professor will be fired over it — it nevertheless would be nice to see her held accountable for her ideologically motivated thievery.

SOURCE