I remember how it was -- JR
Parents Lead the Nation on School Choice
The largest political coalition in America is not Republicans, Democrats, or even independents. It's parents, who comprise a significant majority of all U.S. adults. And today mothers and fathers are more united and energized than ever before around the defining issue of 2022: the education of their children.
This is a new development in American politics, and a direct response to the multi-year campaign of left-wing schooling policies that can only be described as a woke war on parents.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, moms and dads have gotten a clearer view than ever of what goes on with their kids' schooling. What they have seen is one scandalous abuse of power after another.
First there was the COVID paranoia. For more than a year after scientific evidence showed kids were not at risk, and that school closures inflicted unprecedented psychological trauma and learning loss on students, entitled teachers' unions insisted schools stay closed.
During this experiment in institutional negligence we euphemistically called "distance learning," parents also got a glimpse of the ideological indoctrination that woke school boards and bureaucrats called their "curricula." Barely a week goes by without new and outrageous revelations of critical race theory, grooming, the sexualizing of young children, anti-family corruption, and outright crimes committed in the name of woke extremism.
Across the country, biological boys are being praised for dominating the competition... in girls' sports. Edu-crats are proudly filling school libraries with graphic porn. They're banning the Pledge of Allegiance, re-segregating schools by race, and urging pre-pubescent kids to identify with the opposite sex while keeping it secret from their parents.
In these fights, South Carolina families are on the front lines. The state's school librarians are fighting parents to keep pornographic books on their shelves. Richland County School District 2 bureaucrats removed parents' access to the school libraries' online catalogs to hide their anti-parent conspiracy. Pickens Middle School tried to organize segregated lectures from an "antiracist" propagandist.
Other Palmetto State districts are requiring students to read anti-American, ahistorical, racist texts. South Carolina schools are using South Carolinians' tax dollars to teach South Carolina children to hate.
Even worse, leftist elites have embraced this bigotry. President Joe Biden wants to ban schools from telling parents about their children's gender dysphoria, and to potentially punish parents for not using preferred pronouns! This on the heels of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland ordering the FBI to investigate parents protesting woke school boards as potential "domestic terrorists."
Many leftists deny the right of moms and dads to direct their kids' education. Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial candidate last year openly campaigned on the issue: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."
These elites oppose legislation banning CRT or protecting girls' sports and bathrooms. They don't even think parents have a right to know what their children are being taught!
The woke elites in charge of America's education system want to destroy children's innocence, parents' rights, and communities' authority over their schools.
The question now is whether South Carolina lawmakers will stand up to these attacks—whether they will stand up for moms, dads, and kids against the woke bullies standing between America's schoolchildren and the genuine education they deserve.
Parents across the country are now looking for leadership—looking for help. Conservative fighters with the right ideas can deliver it—and now is the time for them to do so.
Critical race theory must be removed from classrooms and pornography purged from school libraries. Lesson plans and materials must be made available to parents. Government must protect parents' right to raise their kids, and girls' right to private spaces and a level athletic playing field.
These reforms are necessary, but not sufficient.
Elected leaders must finally deliver educational choice to all families. School choice is no longer just the civil rights issue of our time—it's the political opportunity of a lifetime and the gateway to full parental control of their kids' education.
Nationwide, 72 percent of registered voters support school choice. Arizona just created the nation's first universal school choice program: $6,500 to every student in the state, every year, to attend whatever school or follow whatever educational approach parents decide. There is no reason South Carolina should not follow suit.
Conservatives have never had a substantive political opportunity like this before. We must seize it and unite America's families against the woke elites conspiring against them.
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/parents-lead-the-nation-school-choice
*********************************************************Middle-Schooler Secretly Records Teacher, Exposes Her Mocking of Trump-Supporting Parents
Parents, be very aware of whom you’re turning your children over to, particularly at public schools. It could be someone like Ann Cook.
Cook is a resource-room instructor at Gray-New Gloucester Middle School in Gray, Maine. She’s managed to go bad-viral after local news outlet The Maine Wire published a five-minute audio recording on Sunday of her mocking supporters of former President Donald Trump, calling a student’s relatives uneducated for voting for him.
The Maine Wire also said the teacher made “several questionable or outright false claims about Trump, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris.”
The audio was reportedly recorded in April by an eighth-grade student at the school who was alarmed about some of his interactions with Cook. Previous conversations reportedly involved her sexuality, as well as that of her students.
The first minute of the recording involves Cook praising Harris’ time as a prosecutor in California, including “putting pedophiles behind bars” (now there’s a brave position for a prosecutor to take) and offering new, progressive opportunities for drug offenders. (Tulsi Gabbard might want to have a word with Cook about that.)
Cook then went on to say that “Trump has a degree from a college — a very, very low-level college — and he was a very poor student.”
As we all know, the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania — Trump’s alma mater — is pretty much America’s safety school. Sure, it’s Ivy League, but it’s not like it’s Ivy Ivy League, if you get my drift. It’s certainly not the University of Delaware, Joe Biden’s undergraduate alma mater.
She went on to say that “if people want to admire [Trump] — I don’t know why — but it wouldn’t mean that I would dislike somebody.”
“Just because somebody’s wearing a Trump hat, I would think to myself, ‘There’s somebody who needs to be educated.’ But I wouldn’t hate them or call them names,” Cook continued.
Clearly not. She then went on to belittle the student’s parents because they supported Trump.
“Your father and stepfather are just caught up in the propaganda,” Cook said. “They believe the lies. And that’s the whole point of lying is that people believe it just ’cause you say it.”
You know, like when you lie and say Trump went to “a very, very low-level college” or insinuate, as she did earlier in the rant, that “he doesn’t pay taxes.”
“I pay taxes, but he doesn’t pay taxes, because he cheats the system,” Cook said.
“He’s a liar and a cheater and he’s not that smart,” she said in a moment of profound projection. “And apparently he’s not that nice either.”
Toward the end of the rant, Cook managed to get racial as well: “Gas prices went up because Russia invaded Ukraine, and rich white men are afraid they’re not going to be making” as much money, she said.
On Monday, school board chairman Sam Pfeifle told the Maine Wire he was “disappointed” in Cook’s propagandizing. “It’s clearly unacceptable for a teacher to be saying those things to students in their classroom,” he said. “It doesn’t follow our controversial topics policy,” Pfeifle said. “I don’t think it follows our mission. I don’t think it’s kind.”
“We try to lead with love and kindness,” he added.
The Maine Wire said Pfeifle couldn’t disclose what disciplinary action Cook faced, if any, because of privacy laws. However, after talking with the school principal and district superintendent, he said, “I’m satisfied that our administration followed all the policies.”
Gray-New Gloucester Middle School Principal Rick Riley-Benoit said he’d had a discussion with the child’s parent after the audio leaked
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Another Vermont Father Says School District Is Punishing Him for Speaking Out Against Biological Male in Girls’ Locker Room
Another Vermont parent has told The Daily Signal that he believes the school district is punishing him for speaking out against a biological male using the girls’ locker room.
John Helfant is one of the volunteer coaches of the Randolph Union High School girls’ varsity soccer team, he said in a Wednesday phone interview. He said he has served as a police officer for 32 years and is the chief of police of the Northfield, Vermont, police department.
Now he believes that because he spoke out against a biologically male student who identifies as transgender using the girls’ locker room, the school district superintendent is using a technicality to prevent him from continuing to coach the varsity girls’ soccer team.
The father of three spoke out in an interview with The Daily Signal team last week outside of a school forum where community members aired their thoughts on a biologically male 14-year-old student using the girls’ locker room while the girls were changing.
“We’ve been fighting for women’s rights as a nation 100 years at least,” Helfant said in the video interview. “I think this is an invasion of women’s rights, it’s just in a different form.”
On Monday afternoon, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Signal, Superintendent Layne Millington emailed Helfant to inform him that the district does not have a record of Helfant “completing the background check procedure, specifically the fingerprinting check.”
“Beginning immediately and continuing until this matter is resolved, you cannot volunteer in any role or for any activity within the OSSD,” the superintendent said, emails show.
Helfant responded to the superintendent: “I will take this as retaliation for my comments against the OSSD and will be informing my attorney.”
“As you know I am a police officer of 32yrs,” he continued. “I obviously have no criminal record or would not have been able to retire from the State Police nor would I still be Chief of Police in Northfield if I did.”
Helfant also told Millington that he submitted the proper paperwork and fingerprints, adding, “If there is a paperwork snafu it is with your people as I provided them with all required paperwork.”
In a phone interview with The Daily Signal, Helfant said that he had fingerprinted himself—which he told Millington officers do “regularly” at his employment—filled out the paperwork, and turned it into the Randolph Union High School front desk.
“My belief is they’re upset about me being outspoken and they wanted to find a way to get me off the field,” Helfant said.
Millington told The Daily Signal that Helfant “is not an employee and hence cannot be disciplined by the district.” He pointed The Daily Signal to an email in which he told Helfant, “No one works or volunteers in the district without full background checks.”
“We receive an actual letter with the results when they have completed their check,” he told Helfant. “It sounds like based on the conversation you had with the secretary, that you were trying to run your fingerprints yourself. There are select locations that do this type of check and who ensure all the paperwork is together at that time so it all gets to the right place. It sounds like you did not follow this process or go to one of those centers – hence the probable hang up.”
The school superintendent, who has claimed that coverage of the girls’ pushback has sparked hatred and bigotry toward both the trans-identifying student and the school district, also accused The Daily Signal of asking “inaccurate” questions and said he would no longer be responding.
In a Wednesday email to the school district community, Millington canceled all Randolph Union High School and district-level open forums, including a Thursday forum, accusing “local members of the community” of reaching “out to groups around the country to try and stir anger against the district.”
“We have again had several threatening phone calls from across the United States,” he said in the email. “While there are no credible threats, out of an abundance of caution we have ramped up security around the district.”
Chris Hurley, another Randolph Union High School father, told The Daily Signal that canceling the meeting has “nothing to do with security.”
“As momentum grows for his removal, he’s trying to control the narrative and cancels his own forum that allows us to speak directly to him and more importantly the community members that he has hoodwinked into believing that the girls’ parents are mere transphobes and hateful bigots for wanting their children safe,” Hurley said. “Again, Layne and his admin have shown contempt for the very community they are hired to serve. People are growing extremely frustrated with his iron fist style of governance.”
School officials have cited state law allowing for students to use locker rooms and bathrooms that align with their stated gender identity. These officials say that they care about everyone’s safety and that Randolph Union High School is investigating whether harassment took place when the girls told their biologically male classmate not to come into their locker room while they were changing.
Parents who spoke with The Daily Signal last week said neither Millington nor the school forum focused on the most pressing matter at hand: their daughters’ discomfort at having a biologically male student in the locker room able to observe them while they are changing.
In a previous interview with The Daily Signal, Helfant cited Vermont’s voyeurism statute, which states that “no person shall intentionally view, photograph, film, or record in any format” the “intimate areas of another person without that person’s knowledge and consent and under circumstances in which the person has a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
“There are no exemptions for schools,” he said, emphasizing that it is “clearly a law violation for a male student to view, watch a female student change her bra or underwear in a women’s locker room or bathroom.”
“My entire life, there’s been this fight for women’s rights and equal pay,” Helfant added. “Guys are literally attacking women’s rights that have been fought so hard for since, you know, the last 100 years, since the suffragettes and to the present time. So it just doesn’t make any sense to me. And I don’t understand why more people aren’t speaking out against it.”
Millington also suspended Travis Allen without pay from his position as the coach of the middle school girls’ soccer team for using male pronouns to refer to the trans-identifying student. That suspension also followed the Daily Signal report highlighting Allen’s daughter’s discomfort at a biological male using her locker room while she was changing.
Allen’s daughter Blake is one of several young ladies who said they were in the Randolph Union High School locker room changing when the trans-identifying student, a biological male, entered the locker room.
Several girls who spoke with The Daily Signal said they asked the student to leave, but that the student did not immediately do so. The girls said the student stood in the corner and looked at them while they were changing, causing them to feel uncomfortable.
Allen offered to avoid using gender pronouns while communicating with trans-identifying students and to take down his social media post. But the school district demanded a public apology from Allen, which he refused, resulting in his suspension.
“When he asked me to publicly apologize, I thought about it,” Allen told The Daily Signal on Tuesday. “I did pause and waited a few seconds. And I’m thinking, ‘If I say that I’ll apologize, I’ll be able to coach my youngest daughter for the rest of the season, but I’m going to, in turn, hurt my other daughter, because I’m not standing up for what we believe in, I’m just cowing to them like so many other people have done. And I just can’t do that.’”
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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