I remember how it was -- JR
Conservatives Fear Schools Being Pressed to Accept Transgender Pronouns, Bathrooms and Showers
Texas school boards are being pressured to adopt policies giving transgender students the right to use preferred pronouns, school bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers, according to conservatives who feel schools are stepping on parental rights.
The Texas American Civil Liberties Union presented a “best practices” program on transgender student legal issues based on Biden’s Department of Education interpretation during a convention on Sept. 24 in San Antonio.
The Texas Association of School Administrators and Texas Association of School Boards 2022 convention included speakers and training for Texas school officials. The ACLU, a liberal civil rights group, titled their program: “Transgender Students in Texas Schools: What You Need to Know.”
ACLU attorneys gave a presentation at the convention that included transgender students speaking directly to officials on “challenges” in schools with restrooms, sports, dress codes, pronouns, and bullying.
David Hamilton, a board member at Fort Bend Independent School Board who attended the ACLU presentation, posted on Twitter that the union was “trying to force Texas public schools to allow boys in girls’ locker rooms, showers, restrooms, and athletics.”
“They had a biological girl who IDs as a boy speak because that appeals better,” his post continued.
When contacted by The Epoch Times, Hamilton said he viewed the ACLU presentation as a warning that schools must accommodate transgender student rights or face lawsuits from it or other liberal groups.
The ACLU did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Texas state Rep. Steve Toth (R-Woodlands) agreed there was a concerted effort to push schools to accept the Biden administrations’ interpretation of Title IX as law. But part of the problem lies with the trustees who don’t question what they’re told, he said.
“There’s no way this isn’t coordinated,” he said. “We’re hearing this in all 50 states.”
“If they put this into place, they’re violating the law,” said Toth, who intends to introduce legislation in 2023 to protect students from sexualization at school.
Title IX, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, now permits students to use restrooms, locker rooms, and compete on sports teams based on their gender identity instead of their biological sex.
Biden issued an executive order after a June 2020 landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that expanded the legal definition of sex discrimination to include sexual orientation and gender identity in employment situations.
The Department of Education and EEOC issued “guidance” in June 2021 prohibiting such discrimination and promising enforcement action against violators, including the loss of federal funding for schools.
However, the Biden administration’s push to enforcing the executive order designed to protect the LGBT community from discrimination in schools and the workplace was blocked by a Tennessee federal judge in July, while a legal challenge launched by 22 attorneys general, including Texas, is making its way through the court system.
On May 5, 2022, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Services issued guidance to Texas and other states announcing that discrimination on the basis of sex in Title IX and the Food and Nutrition Act includes discrimination on the bases of sexual orientation and gender identity.
This put Texas’s Title IX and SNAP school lunch funding at risk.
Also, Biden’s policy directly opposes a Texas law passed last year requiring student-athletes to play on sports teams that correspond with their sex as listed on their birth certificate.
Julie Pickren, a former school board trustee for Alvin ISD and candidate for State Board of Education District 7, told The Epoch Times trustees need a choice regarding training that is objectionable to the values of conservatives.
“We have a responsibility to protect our kids as parents, educators, and public servants,” she added via text.
Hamilton said that ACLU lawyers presented information at the convention indicating suicide attempts by transgender students decreased if schools affirmed their choices on things like pronouns and bathroom preferences.
He felt that the presentation would give school districts who wanted to adopt liberal policies on transgender students an excuse to do so.
Meg Bakich, a parent activist in the Highland Park school district, said parents need to understand what’s happening in their schools.
“Why are school boards paying tax dollars to an association indoctrinating our trustees?” she asked. “Our legislature has done nothing to stop it.”
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LA: Grover Cleveland High School was a "humanities" magnet school -- riven with sexual abuse of minors
The faculty of E Hall were celebrity educators, rock stars of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). They ran Cleveland’s renowned humanities magnet, an interdisciplinary program combining instruction in history, literature, art, and philosophy. “We were like a little Sarah Lawrence in the middle of a Title I school,” an alum told me, referring to the federal program that provides financial assistance for schools with a large population of low-income students. Since its founding in 1981, the magnet had been the subject of glowing news stories, and schools across Los Angeles had replicated its curriculum. The program, which called itself Core, produced so many graduates bound for top-notch colleges that some alumni referred to the University of California at Berkeley as “Core north.”
Core teachers prided themselves on being radicals. They encouraged students to eschew taboos, expand their horizons, and question conventional wisdom. They lectured on systemic racism and postmodernism, and they treated the teenagers they were tasked with educating as “young men and women,” a phrase the program’s founder, Neil Anstead, was fond of using. In turn, the students worshipped them.
Chris Miller was an object of particularly intense adoration. Miller, who taught American history and social studies to juniors, had been with Core since its founding. His students read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. They discussed the imperative of dismantling white supremacy and the patriarchy. A white man approaching fifty, Miller wore Birkenstocks and jewelry, and had a long ponytail that he adorned with a threaded hair wrap, the kind popular among aging hippies and teenage girls. He hugged students and urged them to talk about their feelings; crying wasn’t unusual in his classes.
The fall semester after the Northridge earthquake, Jackie* began eating lunch in Miller’s room. Jackie was petite, with dark hair and a wide, winning smile. But, entering the 11th grade, she felt insecure. “I basically advertised within those first few weeks that I was an incredibly vulnerable 16-year-old girl,” Jackie told me. She assumed that her friends were smarter than she was, and her parents’ rocky marriage was taking an emotional toll. Meanwhile, she struggled to navigate the sexual attention that men and boys had begun showing her.
*Asterisks denote pseudonyms The Atavist is using for women who requested that they not be identified in this story.
Miller made Jackie feel comfortable in his class right away. “He was teaching us things other people were afraid to teach us,” she said. “He was brave, he was a pioneer.” When they talked one on one, she felt that he treated her like an adult, asking her about her life and listening when she spoke. He gave her The Celestine Prophecy, a popular novel about a man’s spiritual awakening, to read and discuss with him. Barely a month into school, Jackie wrote in her diary that Miller was “so fucking cool”—and also a “big flirt” and “very sexual.”
One day, Miller asked Jackie if he was right in sensing an attraction between them. Jackie felt like she had to say yes or he would be disappointed. Besides, maybe she did like him, or should. When Miller asked if she’d ever had sex, Jackie told him she had, which was true. In response, Miller drove her to get an HIV test. Jackie felt like he was taking care of her.
They started seeing each other off campus—teachers and students in Core often interacted outside school, so Jackie didn’t think twice about it. But then, according to Jackie, Miller began sexually abusing her. Once, while giving her a ride to a friend’s house, he pulled over and lunged across the console between them. As Miller kissed Jackie, he placed her hand on his erection. On another occasion, he took her to the beach with two of her friends, both male Core students. The group sat on the sand, with Jackie leaning against Miller’s legs, his arms wrapped around her, and his hands on her breasts. That night, as Miller drove Jackie home, he told her that she could “use” him to work through the problems in her life. He suggested that they write letters to each other and leave them in a filing cabinet in his classroom. He told her to call him “Journey” in the correspondence.
Miller said he loved her. Jackie wanted to believe him. It would be more than two decades before she learned that she wasn’t the only student Miller pursued—and that Miller wasn’t the only Core teacher who allegedly targeted students for abuse.
In 2021, Jackie and three other Jane Does filed lawsuits claiming they were groomed and sexually abused while they were students in Core. Four former teachers, including Miller, are named in the suits as perpetrators. The alleged abuse happened between 1994 and 2009; during that same time frame, according to public records, two additional Core teachers were convicted of crimes involving students, including statutory rape, and a third Cleveland teacher whose classes were popular with magnet students was convicted of possession of child pornography.
Read the legal complaints filed by the four Jane Does and an open letter written by the first woman to come forward to report abuse.
An estimated 10 percent of U.S. students suffer sexual misconduct at the hands of a school employee before they leave high school. Over the past decade, LAUSD has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in response to abuse and harassment claims. What makes Core unique is the number of teachers accused of misconduct over a prolonged period, and the apparent use of the magnet’s curriculum itself to groom students. There is also evidence that some of the teachers’ colleagues and school officials were aware of what was happening but did little or nothing to stop it. “They put the magnet program’s reputation over a student’s well-being. That hurts, you know?” said Kate*, a classmate of Jackie’s and another plaintiff in the lawsuits. “At the end of the day, it was almost like they didn’t care.”
Like the blind thrust faults beneath Los Angeles, the network of suspected wrongdoing at Core is dense, and its capacity for devastation is enormous. This story is based on extensive interviews with the four Jane Does, dozens of other Core alumni, and multiple educators with knowledge of the program. It draws from hundreds of pages of depositions and other legal documents, as well as personal correspondence, yearbooks, journals, and social media postings shared by Core graduates. Two of the accused teachers, including Miller, are deceased; the others either declined to comment for this story or did not respond to interview requests. A spokesperson for LAUSD, which is named as a defendant in the lawsuits, said in a statement that the district “does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”
In 2021, Core celebrated its 40th anniversary. The program remains a crown jewel of LA’s public education system. The women who have come forward understand why: Core taught them to disrupt the status quo, expose injustice, and demand accountability for harm. Now they are doing just that.
https://magazine.atavist.com/fault-lines-cleveland-high-school-reseda-los-angeles-core-abuse/ ?
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Who's to blame for our censorious students?
Without freedom of speech, you do not have a university. More than any other value, it is freedom of speech that most defines the university, that makes it a special place in society set aside for debate and inquiry in which speech and thought should be freer than in practically any other workplace or institution.
And yet an alarming proportion of students seem not to have got the memo. A new study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London confirms what has been clear for some time: that today’s students, far from being rebellious free-thinkers, are if anything more supportive of censorship than the general population.
The numbers are pretty stark. Forty-one per cent of students believe that academics who ‘teach material that offends some students’ should be fired, compared to just 25 per cent of the general public. Similarly, 39 per cent of students believe that students’ unions should ‘ban all speakers that may cause offence’, compared to just 26 per cent of the general public.
The notion that even discussing bigoted ideas risks legitimising them is also alarmingly mainstream on campus. Forty-six per cent of students believe that ‘if you debate an issue like sexism or racism you make it acceptable’. This is essentially a blank cheque for censorship, based on the conviction that people are too easily led to even be exposed to obnoxious ideas.
On all of these questions, a plurality of students side, essentially, with censorship – only around 30 per cent of students disagree with any of these statements. This is the crucial context to the never-ending stories of campus censorship. Whether it is the hounding of Kathleen Stock or the No Platforming of ‘Islamophobic’ speakers – in each case, an alarming number of students will think ‘fair enough’ when they see such censorship. And while ban-happy SU bureaucrats hardly represent all students, we’d be foolish not to take this ideological drift away from free speech among students seriously.
The danger, of course, is that this takes the form of boomerish hectoring – of greying columnists demanding to know why young people aren’t what they used to be. But aside from this tending to alienate those we should hope to win over, this also tends to let older generations off the hook. These illiberal ideas didn’t come from nowhere. These students didn’t emerge from the womb with a predisposition to censorship. They’ve been socialised into a society that sees free speech as dangerous.
Take the great awokening of the British police. It should be little wonder that students’ union officials are clamping down on ‘offensive’ speech when literally thousands of people have been arrested in recent years for posting ‘offensive’ things on the internet. And this wasn’t the work of millennials, working their way through the ranks – restrictions on ‘hate speech’ of one kind or another have been on the British statute books for decades.
We conceded the principle on freedom of speech a long time ago in this country. So much so that even nominally pro-freedom politicians are apparently incapable of defending it as an indivisible liberty. When the government introduced its Free Speech Bill in 2021, then universities minister Michelle Donelan was slapped down for suggesting that Holocaust deniers should be allowed to speak on campus. Boris Johnson’s spokesman quickly made clear that this wasn’t government policy.
It should go without saying that Holocaust deniers are odious racists. But the lot of the free-speech advocate is occasionally having to stick up for the rights of odious racists. You either support free speech for all or for none at all. Plus, what constitutes ‘hate speech’ is very much in the eye of the beholder. Having failed to hold the line on freedom of speech, politicians and commentators can hardly now act surprised that a younger generation is demanding the censorship of a new set of ideas and speakers who they deem wrong and hateful.
Where did these censorious youngsters come from? It’s really quite simple. They were born into a society that has lost faith in freedom of speech.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/whos-to-blame-for-our-censorious-students/
***********************************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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