I remember how it was -- JR
Indiana Student Counselor Fired for Condemning School District’s Hidden Transgender Policy
An Indiana school district fired a student counselor Thursday night for confirming and condemning the existence of a secret transgender policy that keeps parents in the dark about their children’s “gender transitions.”
Kathy McCord worked as a counselor at Pendleton Heights High School for 25 years before the school board voted unanimously to terminate her contract for speaking to the media about confidential documents that board member Buck Evans claimed were “false.”
Evans did not indicate which statements were false.
McCord previously confirmed in an interview with The Daily Signal that the school district, South Madison Community School Corporation, was using a “Gender Support Plan” to assist students in transitioning to a different gender, including calling those students by a new name and personal pronouns.
In his remarks Thursday night, Evans said:
Mrs. McCord admitted she did not tell the truth about providing Mr. Kinnett with the document or correct misleading statements within his article, although she did read it before she started. Misleading statements in The Daily Signal article, along with editing the document, enflamed the public unnecessarily. You can see on this document there is to be a meeting with the child’s parents and/or guardians. Mrs. McCord has not been dismissed because she gave the document to Mr. Kinnett, but because of untruthful statements she made to the administration.
The South Madison school district’s Gender Support Plan allows use of a student’s “old name” and pronouns with parents to keep them unaware of what is going on with their child.
Emails obtained by The Daily Signal from South Madison parents and teachers who asked to remain anonymous show that student counselors would send out notices of a student’s “gender transition” and, if the student chose, request that teachers only use the student’s “old” name and pronouns with parents:
At several school board meetings, Schools Superintendent Mark Hall has claimed that this secret transgender policy both does and doesn’t exist.
At a board meeting in December, Hall said hiding medical information from parents is required as part of the school district’s nondiscrimination policy. But the superintendent appeared to cite the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Nondiscrimination Policy concerning school lunches, which appears on the district website.
Hall repeatedly has refused to provide any comment on or explanation of the secret transgender policy to The Daily Signal or any other media outlet.
Although other medical, counseling, and permission forms are located on the school district’s website, the school district’s Gender Support Plan is absent.
McCord provided a blank copy to The Daily Signal, which confirmed that the form was modeled after a similar form at Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Fishers, Indiana.
South Madison school board members have stated both that they were aware and not aware of the policy, that it didn’t exist, and that it was approved by the board in both 2011 and 2022.
School board President Mike Hanna and his immediate predecessor, Joel Sandefur, have refused to comment to The Daily Signal concerning the discrepancies.
Former geography teacher Amanda Keegan told The Daily Signal that she resigned, in part, due to this secret transgender policy.
“When I had to look at that parent, and feel like I was lying to that parent … I was sick to my stomach. I can’t lie to parents. I can’t do that again,” Keegan said.
Parents repeatedly have shown up to voice their support for McCord. School board meetings have been standing room only in November, December, January, and February, with supporters spilling out into the hallway.
After hearing dozens of supportive testimonies and statements from parents and concerned members of the Pendleton community in November, December, and January, the school board adopted a new policy requiring all speakers to sign up before the start of a meeting. This restriction cut the number of speakers allowed at the February board meeting.
When parents gathered again March 9 at a public hearing by the school board to voice their support for McCord, attendance seemed greater than for any previous board meeting since The Daily Signal exposed the transgender policy.
Yard signs reading “Keep Kathy” have been stolen from several yards in Pendleton, and the Pendleton Police Department told The Daily Signal that it is investigating.
The South Madison school district didn’t respond to requests from local parents to move the public hearing Thursday night to a larger venue to accommodate more attendees.
“It’s despicable what this district is doing to her,” one parent, who held a sign saying “We Support Kathy,” told The Daily Signal on March 2. “Everyone in Pendleton loves Kathy [McCord] to death.”
“She shouldn’t be fired for telling parents what Hall doesn’t want us to know,” the parent added, referring to the superintendent of schools.
Two South Madison teachers, saying they wished to remain anonymous for fear of also being fired, told The Daily Signal on March 1 that they plan to leave the school district at the end of the year to work elsewhere.
“I’m not going to keep secrets from parents for some power-hungry a——,” one teacher said. “I just want to teach.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/03/09/indiana-school-counselor-fired-for-condemning-districts-hidden-transgender-policy/ ?
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Arkansas’ Sanders Signs Ambitious Education Reform Agenda of School Choice, Anti-Indoctrination
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Wednesday signed into law what she called “the largest overhaul of the state’s education system in Arkansas history.”
The “Arkansas LEARNS” initiative is an ambitious reform agenda that expands school choice, modernizes school transportation, restructures teacher compensation to pay more for performance, provides supplemental education for struggling students, and prohibits Arkansas public schools from indoctrinating students.
“We’ve seen how the status quo condemns Arkansans to a lifetime of poverty, and we’re tired of sitting at the bottom of national education rankings,” Sanders said. “We know that if we don’t plant this seed today, then there will be nothing for our kids to reap down the line.”
Perhaps the boldest component of the initiative is the creation of Educational Freedom Accounts, which are similar to education savings account (ESA) policies in 11 other states. With an ESA, families can pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curriculums, online learning, special-needs therapy, and more. ESAs empower families to choose the learning environments that align with their values and best meet their children’s individual learning needs.
Eligibility for the ESAs phases in over three years. In the third year of the ESA program’s operation, all K-12 students will be eligible. In the first year of the ESA program (the 2023-24 academic year), all incoming kindergarten students in Arkansas will be eligible. So will students with disabilities, homeless students, children in foster care, the children of active-duty military personnel, students assigned to low-performing district schools, or children enrolled in one of Arkansas’s other school choice programs.
According to a recent Morning Consult survey, 7 in 10 Arkansans support an ESA policy. Support is even higher among parents of school-aged children, 78% of whom support ESAs.
The Arkansas LEARNS initiative will significantly improve the state’s national standing on education issues. Last year, Arkansas ranked No. 18 in the nation for education choice on The Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
The enactment of a universal ESA would have boosted Arkansas to No. 5 in the nation, assuming other states’ policies remained constant. Of course, competition for the top five will be fierce as states such as Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas are also considering adopting universal education choice policies.
Arkansas’ initiative also takes important steps to protect school students from being exposed to indoctrination or discrimination.
The law requires the Arkansas Department of Education to review its “rules, policies, materials, and communications” to ensure that they are in compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and do not “conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law or encourage students to discriminate against someone based on the individual’s color, creed, race, ethnicity, sex, age, marital status, familial status, disability, religion, national origin, or any other characteristic protected by federal or state law.”
The law also prohibits school faculty and staff or guest speakers from compelling students to “adopt, affirm, or profess an idea in violation” of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, such as that people of one race or ethnicity are inherently superior or inferior to anyone else, or that individuals should “be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s color, creed, race, ethnicity, sex” or other characteristics protected by law.
The statute makes clear that it does not prohibit the discussion of ideas and or the teaching of history.
Students in Arkansas will still learn about the ugly aspects of American history, such as slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow. However, the law will appropriately prohibit lessons that divide students into “oppressors” or “oppressed,” based solely on skin color or that associate certain traits with particular skin colors.
As Tony Kinnett recently reported in The Daily Signal, there are recorded instances of such lessons in critical race theory in Arkansas classrooms, despite the best efforts of mainstream media outlets to deny it.
With the enactment of the Arkansas LEARNS initiative, Sanders has raised the bar for conservative education reform. Arkansas will now be among the top states that empower families to choose the learning environments that work best for their kids.
Arkansas has also taken an important step to ensure that traditional public schools are focused on education, not indoctrination.
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Texas A&M system bans DEI statements
Amidst the nationwide chorus to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in education, the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS) announced on Mar. 2 that it will ban diversity statements from admissions and hiring.
The announcement from TAMUS Chancellor John Sharp follows a Feb. 6 directive from Gov. Greg Abbott. A memo from Abbott’s chief of staff, obtained by The Texas Tribune, told the state’s public colleges and universities to use merit, not DEI, in its considerations.
“We believe serving Texas can be accomplished best by recruiting the brightest and most qualified students, faculty and staff,” Sharp states in the TAMUS announcement.
Sharp also states, "No university or agency in the A&M System will admit any student, nor hire any employee based on any factor other than merit."
TAMUS reviewed its admissions and hiring procedures in response to Abbott’s directive. Job applications, according to the announcement, should only include “a cover letter, curriculum vitae, statements about research and teaching philosophies, and professional references.”
The Texas Tribune reported that the memo from Abbott’s office accused DEI initiatives of “push[ing] policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others.”
“Rebranding this employment discrimination as ‘DEI’ doesn’t make the practice any less illegal,” the memo continued.
The announcement from TAMUS, composed of 11 universities and eight state agencies, follows the University of Texas (UT) System’s decision to pause DEI initiatives at its 13 campuses while reviewing its admissions and hiring.
Texas Tech University (TTU) similarly updated its policies after an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by John Sailer shared documents revealing that its biology department “penalize[s] candidates for heterodox opinions.”
In what appears to be a response to Sailer taking the documents public, Campus Reform reported that TTU eliminated diversity statements from hiring.
Efforts to eliminate DEI from academic and professional life have spread like wildfire. Legislation introduced in Tennessee would ban DEI requirements from the education, training, and employment of professionals providing services in health care, mental health, and social work.
Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction issued a DeSantis-style probe into DEI spending at the state’s public colleges and universities. After DeSantis appointed six new members to the New College of Florida’s board of trustees, the board voted to shut down its DEI office.
Trustee Christopher Rufo said that the move made the New College “the first university in America to abolish its DEI bureaucracy and restore the principle of colorblind equality.”
https://campusreform.org/article?id=21464
***********************************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)
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http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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