I remember how it was -- JR
Thursday, July 28, 2022
Leftist University Students Fought to Cancel Pro-Life Speaker, Plan Completely Backfires on Them
Left-wing students at the University of Michigan Medical School attempted to make a woke statement on Sunday in a thankfully failed effort to cancel a pro-life physician who was asked to deliver the keynote address at a ceremony for the school’s medical students.
Ahead of the address Dr. Kristin Collier, an assistant professor of medicine at UMMS, a group of over 300 students, alumni and physicians attempted to get her barred from the White Coat Ceremony, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
The doctor’s speech was not expected to focus on abortion, but the anti-free speech students and faculty wanted to make her appearance impossible, according to Fox News.
The leftist attempt to quash free speech, though, was actually rebuffed by school administrators, and Collier spoke during Sunday’s event, anyway.
After the school’s decision to refuse to cancel Collier for the White Coat Ceremony, dozens of anti-free speech students decided to walk out during her address.
The White Coat Ceremony is a milestone in the academic career of potential medical professionals.
Video of the walkout earned more than 700,000 likes on Twitter.
Despite the handwringing by the leftists, Collier did not bring up abortion in her speech, but at one point she did make might be considered an allusion to the incidents of the previous weeks.
“I want to acknowledge the deep wounds our community has suffered over the past several weeks,” Collier said, perhaps in reference to the cancellation attempt, or even the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
She went on to add, “We have a great deal of work to do for healing to occur,” Fox reported. “And I hope that for today, for this time, we can focus on what matters most: Coming together to support our newly accepted students and their families with the goal of welcoming them into one of the greatest vocations that exist on this earth.”
At the ceremony were 168 new medical students, according to Fox.
Many leftists students, though, did not want to hear from Collier. In their petition, they claimed that the Dr. would perpetuate “a pattern of disregarding an[d] actively silencing the voice of students and members of our community,” according to The Washington Free Beacon.
The woke students went on to blame Collier for “the expansion of [the university’s] police force in the 1990s” and the “delayed reporting of a child pornography scandal at UM Hospital under the past and interim President Mary Sue Coleman,” the newspaper reported.
Still, the effort to cancel Collier came as a surprise to some students and alumni. Replying to the petition, which was organized by the group Medical Students for Choice, according to the Free Beacon, faculty member Dr. William Chavey ridiculed its claims.
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School Meals Bill Serves Up 2 Unappetizing Helpings of Left’s Agenda
The House Committee on Education and Labor is expected this week to consider legislation known as the Healthy Meals, Healthy Kids Act.
HR 8450 is a far-left wish list, seeking to expand welfare for all through universal free school meals and trying to use the school meals programs as a pretext to push far-left environmental, labor, and social justice policies.
There are many egregious provisions in the legislation, but here are two of the worst:
1) Welfare for all: The legislation is a blatant attempt to expand welfare for everyone, including the wealthy. In the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, a controversial provision was included known as the Community Eligibility Provision.
If 40% of students within a school or school district are deemed to be from “low income” households, then all of the kids within the school or school district can receive free meals.
The Obama administration’s Department of Agriculture then improperly expanded that provision to allow a subset of schools within a school district to be grouped together to trigger free meals.
Therefore, it’s possible for a school with a significant low-income population to be grouped with a school with not a single low-income student, and both schools could provide free meals to every student within those schools, regardless of income.
For years, critics of the Community Eligibility Provision rightly claimed that it was just a scheme to create universal free school meals. Now, there’s no pretense otherwise.
The proposed legislation would reduce the already low 40% threshold number to just 25% and create a statewide Community Eligibility Provision.
The Community Eligibility Provision was purportedly a means to ensure that children who are eligible to receive free meals do in fact receive those meals. Supposedly, it wasn’t intended to be a scheme simply to provide free meals to everyone and create universal free school meals. But that’s what the provision already does to a significant extent, and this proposed bill would take a huge step in making universal free school meals a reality.
2) Far-left values: As mentioned, the school meals program is being used as a pretext to push unrelated left-wing ideological objectives, with children as pawns in this “game.”
Title VI of the bill has two provisions that are especially alarming. Section 601 is titled “values-aligned procurement.” Currently, under existing law, the Agriculture Department is supposed to encourage the purchase of locally grown and locally raised, unprocessed agricultural products. The bill would change that procurement policy to integrate “values” that would encourage the purchase of such products that are produced:
in an environmentally sustainable manner.
by a certified organic farm or ranch.
by a farm with employees who, as permitted by law, are represented by a collective-bargaining agreement or a memorandum of understanding.
by a farm participating in a worker justice certification program.
by a farm participating in an independent animal-welfare certification program.
Clearly, “values” simply mean those consistent with left-wing environmental, labor, and/or social justice agendas, among other things. Another provision under Title VI of the bill, Section 604, would create a “pilot program” for schools to create 100% plant-based food options.
That pilot program would likely be the start of a permanent one. It’s a dietary experiment on kids. School meals are supposed to be based on the federal meals standards, which are required to be consistent with the federal Dietary Guidelines, but this provision would ignore that.
As an aside, Congress should move away from the prescriptive federal standards and instead allow the food provided at local schools to be determined by parents and local communities.
But that’s not what’s happening here with the plant-based diet experiment. Congress would be promoting a specific diet it favors for ideological objectives. This isn’t unlike the environmental extremists who have been trying to change the Dietary Guidelines so that nutrition is based on environmental concerns as much as the dietary needs of humans.
In general, this proposed legislation would turn a means-tested welfare program into one that doesn’t even bother to look at means (i.e., need). It uses a program designed to help children as a way to push unrelated ideological objectives.
The bill is also a slap in the face of American farmers and ranchers, and littered with policies that reflect a rejection of American agricultural practices, from how crops are grown to how animals are treated.
It’s yet another extremist effort to use federal policy to promote an anti-meat agenda, including by trying to indoctrinate kids into being anti-meat and to eat accordingly.
Congress does need to make changes to school meals. But it needs to make changes that help the children the programs are intended to serve, not the extremists who want to use school meals for their own ends.
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Australia: Desperately short of qualified staff, childcare centres ask to bend the rules
The requirement that child care staff must be university-educated is a nonsense. How many mothers have relevant degrees? Some training would probably help but a tech college certificate in the subject should suffice. The shortage of staff is a government-created one
The latest data reveals that 8.1 per cent of childcare providers operated with a staffing waiver in the first quarter of 2022. They could not meet the legal requirement for suitably qualified early childhood teachers on staff.
The staff shortage is likely to get worse and could undermine the Albanese government’s promise to lower childcare costs.
More childcare centres are operating without enough qualified early childhood teachers because of a worsening staff shortage that could undermine the federal government’s pledge to make childcare more affordable.
The latest data from the national early childhood education regulator reveals that 8.1 per cent of childcare providers operated with a staffing waiver in the first quarter of 2022 because they could not meet the legal requirement for suitably qualified early childhood teachers on staff. Four years ago, the figure was 3.9 per cent.
A further 3.1 per cent of service providers received a waiver because the physical environment of their centre was not up to standard. Four years ago, that was 2.3 per cent.
Long day care centres, preschools and kindergartens are required by law to have a certain number of qualified early childhood teachers, based on the number of children being educated or cared for.
Centres that cannot meet this staffing obligation need a waiver from the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority.
Jobs data indicates the shortage is likely to get worse, and could affect the sector’s ability to deliver on the Albanese government’s promise to lower childcare costs, which is, in turn, expected to increase demand.
National Skills Commission data also shows that in May, the number of vacancies in early childhood education and care hit a record 6648 positions. The figure has more than doubled in the past three years.
John Cherry, head of advocacy at Goodstart, Australia’s largest not-for-profit early learning provider, said pandemic border closures had deprived the sector of a pipeline of qualified staff from overseas. Most Australian states were also failing to invest enough in building a domestic qualified early learning workforce, he said.
“More services have been struggling with some of the requirements to have a certain percentage of your educators with a diploma qualification because there’s just not enough educators out there,” Cherry said.
He said attrition was also a serious problem for the sector, with many qualified early childhood educators moving on to better paid careers elsewhere.
“The award rate for a teacher in early childhood is $10,000 to $20,000 less than the award rate for a teacher in the government school sector,” Cherry said. “So when you look at those numbers, you rapidly realise why we keep losing people – our rates of pay just aren’t where they need to be.”
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said finding enough early childhood educators to meet demand was a big challenge.
“We have a shortage of early childhood education and care workers now and this is expected to get bigger,” he said.
Clare said the Albanese government’s fee-free TAFE and additional university places would help to train more early childhood education and care workers.
Early childhood educators are planning to strike on September 7, highlighting low pay and poor conditions. Hundreds of centres around Australia are expected to have to close on that day.
Laureate Professor Marilyn Fleer, the foundation chair of Early Childhood Education and Development at Monash University, said qualified early childhood educators helped to set children up for a better start to school.
“There is such long-standing evidence that shows there is a qualitative difference in how a university-qualified early childhood educator interacts with children,” she said.
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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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