Texas Governor Signs Bill Allowing More Armed Teachers

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a law Thursday allowing more teachers to carry firearms and expands mental health services for students in the wake of the mass shooting last year at a high school near Houston.

The bill removed the previous on the number of armed teachers allowed on school campuses of one per every 200 students or one per school. The measure also encourages schools to train teachers to recognize mental health issues among students, increase the number of mental health counselors at schools, and install “threat assessment teams” to track potential threats from students.

Ten people were fatally shot and 13 more wounded at at Santa Fe High School near Houston in May of last year, the sixth most deadly school shooting in U.S. history.

Abbott, a Republican, has made school safety a priority since then, but the legislature has focused on campus security and mental health rather than gun control, passing measures approving metal detectors, and shooter alarm systems among other means to secure schools.

Teachers who wish to participate in Texas’s school armed marshal program, which was implemented after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 must undergo active shooter drills as well as 80 hours of training. School marshals must keep their weapons locked up and away from students unless their main job does not involve “regular, direct contact with students,” in which case they are allowed to carry a concealed firearm.

Florida passed a controversial measure last month allowing classroom teachers to carry firearms in school, although many districts opted out, including Broward County, where the mass shooting that killed 17 at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School occurred last year.

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This Teacher Came Out to His Students as Transgender, and Expects Them to Go Along With It

Transgender activists are continuing to force their lifestyle and language preferences onto children and college students, with little interference from administrative officials. All of this encourages young people to deny biology and accept these new “norms” as fact.

Case in point: Mark Vincent Busenbark, a male science teacher at Allis Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin.

In May, Busenbark showed a video of himself “coming out” as transgender to all-aged elementary students who were present, from kindergarten through fifth grade.

In the video, he read a book to the children called, “They Call Me Mix,” which includes dialogue like: “‘BOY or GIRL?’ Are you a boy or a girl? How can you be both? Some days I am both. Some days I am neither. Most days I am everything in between.”

At the video’s conclusion, Busenbark said, “And now, let me introduce myself, anew. I am going to take my wife, Stella Steel’s last name, and I am going to use, not mister, not miss, but ‘mix.’ So you can call me, ‘Mix Steel.’ And for my pronouns, you can call me ‘they,’ ‘them,’ and ‘their.’”

He suggested that people who disagree with his transgenderism are motivated by “fear” and “hate” and depicted said folks as ghostlike, scary people. On Busenbark’s Facebook page, he said the purpose of showing every student the video was so that “all [the children] can know who I am and who I am becoming.”

Liberty Counsel, a religious liberty advocacy group, is investigating the matter. In a statement, founder and Chairman Mat Staver said:

It is outrageous that school administrators would allow a male science teacher to expose children to propaganda that promotes confusion about basic biology, and to instruct students to address him by a false name, title, and pronouns. These impressionable students do not exist to validate Busenbark’s sexual identity. Parents send their children to school trusting that they will be taught academic curriculum, not become participants in a teacher’s play acting.

This is not the first time this has happened—nor will it likely be the last. This is, however, one of the first reports I have seen of this happening in elementary school.

This occurred at a university in 2018. Nicholas Meriwether, a Shawnee State University professor, became the subject of an official complaint when he refused to refer to a male student, who decided to be transgender, with feminine pronouns.

In an attempt to compromise, Meriwether offered to refer to the student by his last name. That didn’t stop the student from filing a formal complaint to the university, which launched an investigation, prompting Meriwether to seek legal counsel. Administrative officials then gave him a written warning threatening “further corrective actions” if he did not comply.

In fact, a very similar situation is the reason Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson initially became so well-known: not because of his book, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” but rather his insistence that the Canadian government should not mandate that people refer to transgender-identified people by their “preferred” pronouns—particularly ones that seem entirely contrived, like “ze.”

A similar controversy in Virginia resulted in public school teacher Peter Vlaming losing his job. This is the kind of thing we could expect to see nationwide if the Equality Act were to pass.

Unfortunately, transgender “rights” and forced conformity for everyone else are two sides of the same coin. Throughout our education system, the rights of students and teachers alike are trampled when they are forced to go along with a fiction, under the guise of tolerance and acceptance. Students are compelled to watch “coming out” videos. Professors are compelled to call a male student “Jessica” or be labeled intolerant or bigots.

Yet the real bigotry here is a lack of concern for the rights of people who are being forced to use labels that don’t make sense.

Compelling the speech of children 10 years old and younger is particularly egregious because children this age are so malleable. This elementary school teacher is not only informing students about his chosen identity that blatantly denies biology, and is therefore false, but he’s forcing students to refer to him as such.

Compelled speech in a system that’s supposed to champion free speech, ideas, education, and curiosity is a travesty to our children. It is one that administrations, teachers, and parents must combat.

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A college degree doesn't equal success — it takes a lot more than that

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago raised some eyebrows when he said during a recent speech that the skyrocketing costs associated with earning a college degree may be too risky for some young people.

“With over $1.5 trillion in outstanding student debt,” said Chicago Fed President Charles Evans, “knowing how to help young adults better recognize and manage their risks related to higher education is an important input into my assessment of our economy.”

“My interpretation of the research is that disadvantaged students in particular experience significant risks associated with their choice of institution, likelihood of graduating, earnings potential after college, and ability to repay student loans. So, for these students, it is not always obvious that college is an investment that pays off,” Evans added.

As Evans noted in his speech, Americans face $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. Some Democratic presidential hopefuls want to forgive student loan debt or offer free college as a response to the high costs of going to college. Of course, this is the wrong approach. As is the case in healthcare, and virtually anything else, when the government subsidizes something, the associated costs necessarily rise.

America needs to re-think its approach to post-secondary education. Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, has warned that we’re devaluing education by pushing more people to pursue traditional collegiate post-secondary education.

“Civilized societies revolve around education now, but there is a better—indeed, more civilized—way. If everyone had a college degree, the result would be not great jobs for all, but runaway credential inflation,” Caplan explains. “Trying to spread success with education spreads education but not success.”

My take on this is a little different. A college degree is not always necessary for a successful career, but a person choosing that route must be prepared to work incredibly hard and expect to not achieve success until well into adulthood. Even then, success may be elusive, but a college degree does not guarantee a successful career, either.

I come from a lower-middle class background. My father passed away when I was 12 years old. My mother largely raised me while working a full-time job, and occasionally a second job to help make ends meet. I attended an inexpensive private school for part of middle school and early high school. By the end of my freshman year, I was helping pay my part of my tuition.

In 1999, I graduated from Eagle’s Landing High School in McDonough, Ga., a small city in metro Atlanta. I didn’t apply myself, so I didn’t have the best grades. I took the year after high school to work. I pulled the morning shift at a Chick-fil-A in nearby Stockbridge and played in a band with some high school friends. I enrolled in a local college for two semesters before weighing some personal circumstances that I faced. I dropped out and never went back. I continued playing music while jumping from job to job, such as waiting tables, selling cell phones, and doing customer service.

In my downtime, I would listen to a nationally syndicated talk radio show hosted by Neal Boortz, who had a mostly libertarian perspective on politics, and I would read books on philosophy, economics, and religion. I volunteered on local political campaigns, dabbled in the Republican and Libertarian parties, and started a blog focused on local and state politics. I met a guy by the name of Erick Erickson, who invited me to join a Georgia political blog, Peach Pundit, to offer a philosophically libertarian perspective on what was happening around the state.

Over time, I began getting paid to write as a part-time job. At one point, I had a full-time job completely unrelated to politics and two part-time jobs that allowed me to write about politics and policy. I would wake up at 4 a.m. and work for a few hours for a part-time job before I began my day job. I would go home and work for three more hours on another part-time job.

The way I look at it is, 40 hours is the bare minimum. If you want to pursue something, one has to have the drive to do it. I was nearly 32 years old before I began working full-time in politics. I was 33 when I started working for FreedomWorks. Since then, I’ve managed the organization’s criminal justice reform program and run the communications department.

Today, I run FreedomWorks’ legislative affairs shop. In this role, I’ve worked on a number of legislative issues from tax policy to regulatory issues to criminal justice reform. In December, I was invited to attend the ceremony at which President Trump signed the First Step Act into law. This was a long-overdue legislative initiative that reformed some federal prison sentences, and, as long as it’s implemented properly, will bring evidence-based recidivism reduction programming to federal prisons.

The avenues that I took to get where I am today were unorthodox, and I don’t want to be perceived as telling young people to skip college. In fact, I’ve encouraged constitutional conservative and libertarian interns who have come through our doors to stay in school, learn as much as possible, and get their degrees. That's because the lack of a college degree was an obstacle in my path.

Every young person’s path looks different. For most of these interns, their paths would be aided by having a college degree. For many others, their passions don’t reflect the same reality. As the free market dictates in any other space, any type of post-secondary education should be pursued if it is advantageous for an individual. By imposing one-size-fits-all regulations on education, and especially by forgiving student debt and offering “free” college, the federal government worsens the problem. Instead, it should stay out of the issue and allow the market to work its will.

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