NYC students stuck on hot school buses during heat wave with no AC

This is crazy. NYC regularly has hot summers. It was quite hot last time I was there. All buses should have working AC

Many public school buses transporting young students and children with disabilities during an interminable heat wave in New York City don’t have air conditioning, families told The Post.

The advocacy group Parents to Improve School Transportation (PIST), citing workforce sources, says more than half of the buses don’t have cool air.

The city Department of Education has received hundreds of complaints about sweltering conditions on the vehicles since the “Summer Rising” academic and camp program began July 5, according to city data. The DOE did not provide its own counts of the buses without air conditioning or affected students.

“The bus drivers are sweating through their uniforms, the attendants [too],” said Paullette Healy, a parent in Brooklyn with two children in public schools and member of the Citywide Council for Special Education. “Kids are coming off flushed, fatigued, exhausted — so many signs of dehydration and heat stroke.”

The DOE estimated there are roughly 41,000 students being bused this summer.

The crisis reached a boiling point on Thursday, when an overturned school bus in the Bronx injured dozens of drivers and staff, and led to delays and prolonged commutes for many more children. Advocates told The Post that children got nauseous and dizzy on the bus.

“It’s hot. The AC is not working. They have no access to a bathroom or to water. Those are the circumstances that follow when accidents like this happen,” said Healy.

According to the DOE, AC-related complaints so far this summer are down since before the pandemic in 2019 by approximately 75% — from 1,124 in 2019 at the same point in the summer to 285 this year as of mid-week.

But advocates are certain that the number is an undercount, as parents report being put on hold for hours by the Office of Pupil Transportation’s call center — or not getting through at all. And when families try to file complaints online, they receive an auto-reply to call the hotline, they said.

Rima Izquierdo, a Bronx-based parent and advocate, told The Post she has filed multiple complaints about the heat, but the cases get closed because the buses are standard and do not have the capacity for cooling.

“They’re deterring people from filing incidents that give you a number and become something you can track,” Izquierdo said.

Those issues have persisted despite a recent $9.4-million contract to expand help desk services to support school bus inquiries, including up to 20,000 calls and 2,000 web chats monthly.

“My kids will come off the bus red, very flushed. Feverish. Sweating,” said Izquierdo. “The back of their shirt soaked, the front of their shirt in the middle soaked. Maybe sometimes the pants will have sweat marks from sitting down for so long. Both of my kids have asthma, so sometimes it results in them feeling tightness in their breath.

Of the drivers and attendants, she added, “Those are deplorable work conditions. You have to take care of children, you have to be attentive. How, if you feel you’re going to pass out yourself? It’s not safe for a driver to be driving in that heat.”

The Special Commissioner of Investigation put school bus vendors on notice in 2019 with an investigation into those operating at dangerously hot temperatures. Since then, the DOE says it has heightened inspection of vendors, including surprise visits, and increased follow-up on violators. Officials did not give the results of the actions, including fines.

The DOE also conducted meetings with bus companies reviewing “Climate Control Policy,” it said, but would not provide additional details. Buses without AC installed are ventilated with open windows, they added.

Queens mom Denise Owens said her 11-year-old son Evan, who has autism, is legally entitled to cooler school buses as part of his individual education plan, or IEP.

“The city is having cooling centers, yet we’re putting our children on a hot bus. We’re giving out heat advisories, but we’re going to throw children with special needs on a hot bus,” Owens said.

Owens told The Post she has at least three open complaints to the pupil transportation office.

“When it comes to AC specifically, they’re breaking the law,” said Healy. “Any company that is not pulling a vehicle off the road without AC is violating the law.”

Climate change experts are “virtually certain” that heat waves will become more common and more intense in future years.

“Every student who relies on school busing deserves a safe and comfortable ride to school, and we hold bus companies accountable to this standard,” said Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for the DOE.

“The DOE’s Office of Pupil Transportation tracks and quickly addresses any and all escalations related to temperatures on school buses, including assigning inspectors as needed and following up with bus companies based on reports received.”

https://nypost.com/2022/07/23/nyc-students-stuck-on-hot-school-buses-during-heat-wave/

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Los Angeles Unified School District has adopted a radical gender-theory curriculum encouraging teachers to work toward the “breakdown of the gender binary,”

I have obtained a trove of publicly accessible documents from Los Angeles Unified that illustrates the extent to which gender ideology has entered the mainstream of the nation’s second-largest school district. Since 2020, the district’s Human Relations, Diversity, and Equity department has created an infrastructure to translate the basic tenets of academic queer theory into K-12 pedagogy. The materials include a wide range of conferences, presentations, curricula, teacher-training programs, adult-driven “gender and sexuality” clubs, and school-sponsored protests.

In a week-long conference last fall, titled “Standing with LGBTQ+ Students, Staff, and Families,” administrators hosted workshops with presentations on “breaking the [gender] binary,” providing children with “free gender affirming clothing,” understanding “what your queer middle schooler wants you to know,” and producing “counter narratives against the master narrative of mainstream white cis-heteropatriarchy society.” The narrative follows the standard academic slop: white, cisgender, heterosexual men have built a repressive social structure, divided the world into the false binary of man and woman, and used this myth to oppress racial and sexual minorities. Religion, too, is a mechanism of repression. During the conference, the district highlighted how teachers can “respond to religious objections” to gender ideology and promoted materials on how students can be “Muslim and Trans.”

In another training program, titled “Queering Culture & Race,” the Human Relations, Diversity, and Equity office encouraged teachers to adopt the principle of intersectionality, a key tenet of critical race theory, and apply it to the classroom. First, administrators asked teachers to identify themselves by race, gender, and sexual orientation, and to consider their position on the identity hierarchy. The district then encouraged teachers to “avoid gendered expressions” in the classroom, including “boys and girls” and “ladies and gentlemen,” which, according to queer theory, are vestiges of the oppressive gender binary. Administrators also warned teachers that they might have to work against the families of their minority students, especially black students, regarding sexuality. “The Black community often holds rigid and traditional views of sexual orientation and gender expression,” the presenters claimed. “Black LGBTQ youth experience homophobia and transphobia from their familial communities.”

Finally, Los Angeles Unified has gone all-in on “trans-affirming” indoctrination. The Human Relations, Diversity, and Equity department has flooded the district with teaching materials, including, for example, videos from the consulting firm Woke Kindergarten encouraging five-year-olds to experiment with gender pronouns such as “they,” “ze,” and “tree” and to adopt nonbinary gender identities that “feel good to you.” The district requires teachers to use a student’s desired name and pronoun and to keep the student’s gender identity a secret from parents if the student so desires. In other words, Los Angeles public schools can facilitate a child’s transition from one gender to another without notifying parents. And the district is far from neutral: it actively celebrates sexual identities such as “pansexual,” “sexually fluid,” “queer,” “same-gender-loving,” and “asexual,” and gender identities such as “transgender,” “genderqueer,” “agender,” “bigender,” “gender nonconforming,” “gender expansive,” “gender fluid,” and “two-spirit.”

The problem with creating a “trans-affirming” culture is obvious. In one of the district’s own materials, “Mental Health Among Transgender Youth,” the Human Relations, Diversity, and Equity department cites a survey by Mental Health America pointing out that, among 11-to-17-year-old transgender youth who were screened for mental health issues, 93 percent were at risk for psychosis, 91 percent exhibited signs of posttraumatic stress disorder, 90 percent likely used drugs and alcohol, 90 percent experienced moderate-to-severe anxiety, and 95 percent experienced moderate to severe depression. Additionally, according to a Trevor Project study, 71 percent of transgender youth have been diagnosed with eating disorders, with the ratio even higher for female-to-male transgender children.

These numbers are deeply alarming. But rather than provide a sober assessment of these risks and seek to mitigate them, Los Angeles Unified has adopted a year-round program glamorizing transgender identity and promoting an uncritical, “trans-affirming” culture in the classroom. It is, of course, a noble goal for schools to provide a safe environment for minority groups and to affirm the basic dignity of all children regardless of their sexuality. But Los Angeles Unified’s program goes much further, promoting the most extreme strains of transgender ideology, which almost certainly contributes to the “social contagion” effect documented by Abigail Shrier and others.

The Los Angeles Unified School District governs the educational life of more than 600,000 children, the majority of whom are racial minorities from poor families. The implicit cynicism of the district’s gender-ideology instruction is sickening: highly educated, well-paid bureaucrats promote fashionable academic programming that will do nothing to provide a basic education for these children or help them move up the economic and social ladder. It will only keep them trapped in a morass of confusion, fatalism, and resentment—while the bureaucrats keep collecting their paychecks.

https://www.city-journal.org/sexual-liberation-in-public-schools ?

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Girl, 13, is youngest black student accepted to medical school: ‘What is age?’

At just 13 years old, Alena Analeigh Wicker just became the youngest black student to ever be accepted to medical school.

The young girl, from just outside Fort Worth, Texas, was reading chapter books at 3 and taking high school courses at 11 — and she enrolled in two colleges at 12 to earn two separate degrees.

But she’s not focused on her age — just her potential impact.

“What is age?” Alena asked during an interview with the Washington Post. “You’re not too young to do anything. I feel like I have proven to myself that I can do anything that I put my heart and mind to.”

The brilliant young teen has always been a few steps ahead of her peers but doesn’t think she’s too different.

“I’m still a normal 13-year-old,” Alena insisted.

Aside from her studies, she still enjoys going to the movies, playing soccer, baking and hanging out with friends.

“I just have extremely good time management skills and I’m very disciplined,” she explained.

Alena is currently a college junior at both Arizona State University and Alabama’s Oakwood University, where she is earning two separate undergraduate degrees in biological sciences through mostly online courses.

Encouraged by her family, educators and advisers, she applied for early acceptance to medical school at the University of Alabama’s Heersink School of Medicine for 2024.

In May she was accepted into the program — even though she is more than 10 years younger than the average incoming med student.

And regardless of her age, the chances of Alena being accepted were already very slim, with only 7% of applicants being accepted into US medical schools and only 7% of those being black students.

“Statistics would have said I never would have made it,” Alena wrote in an Instagram post sharing the exciting news last month. “A little black girl adopted from Fontana, California. I’ve worked so hard to reach my goals and live my dreams.”

“Mama, I made it. I couldn’t have done it without you. You gave me every opportunity possible to be successful. You cheered me on, wiped my tears, gave me Oreos when I needed comfort, you never allowed me to settle, disciplined me when I needed. You are the best mother a kid could ever ask for. MAMA, I MADE IT!” she continued.

“You always believed in me. You allowed me space to grow and become, make mistakes without making me feel bad. You allowed me the opportunity to experience the world.”

https://nypost.com/2022/07/20/girl-13-is-youngest-black-student-accepted-to-medical-school/

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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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