Monday, July 11, 2022


Judge Sides With Parent, Strikes Down Los Angeles School Vaccine Mandate A plan to mandate COVID-19 vaccine shots for hundreds of thousands of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) will remain on pause after a Los Angeles County judge ruled on July 5 that the district lacks the authority to do so. In his ruling, Judge Mitchell Beckloff of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County sided with a parent, whose 12-year-old son attends a public magnet school in North Hollywood. The parent filed the complaint in October 2021, about a month after the LAUSD announced its vaccination mandate. Under the district’s mandate, all eligible students aged 12 and above must show proof of COVID-19 vaccination, or get approved for exemptions by Jan. 10 in order to attend school in person. Those who don’t comply would be transferred into the district’s remote learning program, City of Angels, which offers a mixture of live instruction and self-study. The suing parent, identified as G.F., argued that it is unfair and unlawful for the child, identified as D.F., to have to lose his hard-earned place at a competitive school just because he and his parent have chosen to not get vaccinated on the basis of personal beliefs. According to G.F., his son had acquired natural immunity after recovering from COVID-19. He also said he worried that vaccinating the child would put the child’s health in jeopardy. “Either I get him a vaccine that I fear could harm him, or I send him to a virtual school that I know from experience and LAUSD’s own data would prove academically vastly inferior,” the father said earlier this year in a sworn declaration, reported City News Service. “The idea of dumping him into an online school, free of a rigorous academic program and torn away from his like-minded classmates, breaks my heart.” Beckloff, who wrote in March in a tentative opinion that he might dismiss the case, agreed with the father in his final ruling, acknowledging that if D.F. refuses to comply with the mandate, he will be forced to accept a very different education. “The [mandate] is not merely about how education is delivered or who may be physically present on campus as the court previously viewed it. Instead, the [mandate] dictates which school the student may attend, and the curriculum he may continue to receive,” the judge wrote, reported the Los Angeles Times. The judge also noted that the LAUSD mandate is in conflict with California’s public health law, which allows personal beliefs-based vaccination exemptions. “Judge Beckloff’s ruling confirms that individual school districts do not have the authority to impose local vaccination requirements in excess of statewide requirements,” Arie Spangler, an attorney for G.F., said in a statement. “We are very pleased with the ruling, as it ensures that no child will be forced out of the classroom due to their COVID-19 vaccination status.” The decision doesn’t have an immediate impact on LAUSD, since the mandate has already been placed on hold after California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in April that the state would wait for the federal government to give full approval to the COVID-19 vaccine for young children. The Newsom administration and school district have both said they won’t pursue the pediatric vaccine mandate until at least the summer of 2023. https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-sides-with-parent-strikes-down-los-angeles-school-vaccine-mandate_4580965.html ********************************************** Anger after elite $57,000-a-year Brooklyn private school Poly Prep asks students as young as 10 if all racial groups are as smart as each other, their sexual orientation and their parents' political beliefs An elite Brooklyn private school was forced to shelve an invasive questionnaire that surveyed students as young as 10 about their sexual orientation and their parents' political beliefs. Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, which charges parents more than $57,000 per year, disguised the questionnaire under the name 'DEIB climate survey.' 'DEIB' stands for: 'diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.' Statements included: 'Most people think that people from my racial/ethnic group are as smart as people of other racial/ethnic groups,' 'Women have fewer chances to get ahead,' and 'Teachers teach about racial inequality in the United States.' Students were required to answer on a scale going from 'really agree' to 'really disagree.' The questions went on to become even more intimate in nature, asking about students' gender and sexual orientation. Other questions centered around parents' income, political opinions and personal beliefs. It was administered to children in grades 5 through 12. The questionnaire was made public by the Virginia-based advocacy group Parents Defending Education. The group describes itself as 'a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas.' According to the group, the answers were not anonymous and students were required to include their email address in their completed survey. In one section, students were asked if their parents had made a donation to the school, and how much they had given. The school was forced to shelve the questionnaire in May after furious backlash from parents. An email to parents, leaked by Parents Defending Education, from the school's principal Audrius Barzdukas read: 'After reviewing our process, we learned of multiple issues with the survey including ones that made the data unreliable.' The message continued: 'Those issues included final edits not being included in the version that was administered and significant variability in how the survey was facilitated. All the data have been permanently deleted.' In an apology, Barzdukas apologized for the 'confusion and discomfort this survey caused.' This is not the first time Barzdukas has faced backlash from parents. In November 2021, parents were furious when he fired the school's football coach Kevin Fountine. The principal accused the coach of promoting 'toxic culture' in the school's football program. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10998957/Elite-Brooklyn-private-school-forced-trash-62-page-invasive-questionnaire.html ************************************************* Harvard University is actively promoting anti-semitism on campus Harvard University provides its students with unparalleled knowledge, skills and experiences. Yet, as we Jewish students have witnessed, the routine vilification of the State of Israel — both inside and outside the classroom — indicates that something in Harvard’s contemporary education has gone seriously awry. In the latest example of this trend, the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson endorsed the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) the Jewish state in an April 29 editorial. BDS represents the economic arm of a global effort — spearheaded militarily by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran — to destroy the Jewish state. That a majority of the Crimson’s 87-member editorial board believes this movement to be part of the global struggle for social justice has significance both for Harvard and American society more broadly. The hostility toward Israel that has permeated our campus — which often involves the endorsement of anti-Semitic attitudes, assumptions, and activities — is symptomatic of larger trends: a retreat from robust critical thinking and a surrender to the most hysterical, least rigorous elements of campus activism. Such trends at Harvard are regrettable not merely because BDS is fundamentally anti-Semitic but also because its advocacy rests upon several falsehoods. The most pernicious is the idea that Jews don’t belong in Israel, that their presence constitutes an act of colonialism against the native Palestinian population. Such a position betrays an often-contrived ignorance of the millennia-long connection between the land of Israel and the Jewish people. It is also a denial of the right of self-defense for history’s most persecuted minority. Yet this view has become de rigueur in a contemporary Harvard education. The Chan School of Public Health hosts courses such as “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health,” which focuses on demonstrating how Israel’s “settler colonial” society undermines the health of “indigenous people.” Harvard Divinity School’s program of Religion and Public Life has hosted a year-long series of anti-Israel seminars, platforming numerous speakers who advocate for the “decolonization” and even the “de-Judaisation” of Israel. It is hard to imagine that any other national entity would be subject to seminar after seminar informing them that their own national aspirations are uniquely illegitimate. This makes Harvard less welcoming for Jewish students. Those who wish to enter the classes of Amos Yadlin, a retired Israeli general and politician, at Harvard Kennedy School have had to walk through a gauntlet of protesters accusing them of complicity in genocide. Jewish students have had to walk next to the “apartheid wall” constructed in Harvard Yard during Passover, which employs Holocaust imagery to depict Israel’s behavior toward Palestinians and declares that “Zionism = Racism.” Inside many classrooms, Jewish students are too intimidated to speak out against the new intellectual and social orthodoxy that deems Israel to be the world’s worst human-rights violator. Having witnessed this process repeat itself across the university, we can’t avoid the suspicion that such hatred of the world’s largest Jewish collective is a smokescreen for something darker. The Crimson’s endorsement of BDS has engendered a backlash within the Harvard community. Multiple former Crimson editors, current Crimson editors, and former Harvard president Lawrence Summers have all issued denouncements. An open letter opposing BDS has recently been signed by close to 150 faculty members. However, most of these signatories teach at Harvard’s medical and business schools and are therefore far removed from the classrooms in which such issues are likely to be discussed. The departments that produce future politicians, journalists, and members of the intelligentsia — especially Harvard’s Divinity School, Kennedy School, and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — have become fortresses of anti-Israel ideology. That Harvard students are absorbing and endorsing BDS attitudes raises central questions about their educational experience. Does nothing in their training demand a critical assessment of these ideas? Why have Harvard students, supposedly loyal to the value of veritas, abandoned the pursuit of complex truths in favor of wholesale condemnation of the world’s only Jewish country? Most importantly, if hatred of the Jewish state becomes the default position across campus, do Jewish students have a future at Harvard? The university should take a long, hard look at the attitudes currently holding favor within its confines. https://nypost.com/2022/07/09/harvard-university-actively-promotes-anti-semitism-on-campus/ *********************************** My other blogs: Main ones below http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM) http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH) http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS) http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED) *******************************

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