These Schools Removed Cops to Appease BLM—It Didn't End Well

Two years after a high school in Denver, Colorado, removed all law enforcement officers from school grounds based on the belief that arresting "Black and Brown students for minor school infractions" perpetuates the "school-to-prison pipeline," a black gunman, who was an expelled student, shot two school administrators Wednesday. Sadly, it's a disturbing yet predictable trend we're seeing in schools across America that have rid themselves of on-campus police to appease Black Lives Matter activists.

As Julio covered, during the height of the violent BLM-Antifa riots, the Denver Public Schools Board of Education passed a resolution in June 2020 that eliminated the presence of all school resource officers (SRO), a unanimous 7 - 0 vote that ended its contract with the Denver Police Department and nixed all SRO positions within a year, over concerns that the "outsourcing of school discipline to police disproportionately impacts Black and Brown students." According to the SRO Transition Project's report, the resolution was driven by the district's "commitment to dismantle racism and become an anti-racist organization."

The board's vice president Auon'tai M. Anderson, who introduced the resolution, celebrated its passage. "WE DID IT!" Anderson tweeted. "#BlackLivesMatter." In a recent Medium article, titled "Removing SROs from Schools: A Step Towards Justice and Safety for Students of Color," Anderson asserted on Feb. 16: "While there have been concerns about the safety and well-being of students, it’s important to acknowledge the negative impacts that SROs can have on students, particularly students of color."

Now, two armed officers will be stationed at Denver East High School for the remainder of the academic year in the wake of Wednesday's double shooting that injured two deans. DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero sent a letter addressed to the school board, informing its members that at least one armed cop will also be posted at each of the district's comprehensive high schools.

The city's Democrat mayor agreed and "strongly" backed Marrero's move. In a statement posted to social media, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock admitted the decision to do away with SROs was "a mistake" and that "we must move swiftly to correct it."

Shortly after, the board issued a response, saying it supports the police's return for the rest of this school year.

17-year-old Austin Lyle was identified as the shooter who wounded the pair of faculty members, leaving one in "serious condition" following surgery. Lyle was under "a safety plan" that was specifically designed for him to be patted down each day before entering the school, but during the daily search Wednesday, the student pulled out a weapon, shot the two deans, and fled. As Matt pointed out, the now-deceased black suspect's race is actively being omitted from the mainstream media's coverage.

Denver7 reports that DPS has a "discipline matrix" in place, which measures student misconduct on six varying levels of severity. The objective is to "disrupt bias, fight disproportionality, and apply the Discipline Matrix in [an] anti-racist and trauma-informed manner," explains a document outlining the disciplinary ladder, intended to "make a difference in breaking historical inequity!"

Lyle's "safety agreement" was individually tailored from a threat-level assessment, educators told Denver7 News, but Marrero declined to specify what may have prompted it other than "past behavior." According to the Cherry Creek School District, Lyle was a former student there "previously disciplined for violations of board policy" at nearby Overland High School, prior to expulsion.

This week marked the second shooting at Denver East High School, which is reportedly shaken by frequent lockdowns and violence, in the span of weeks. Last month, a 16-year-old classmate was shot dead in his car outside of the school on Feb. 13. Two teens—both DPS students—have been arrested, per KDVR. The slain student's brother is speaking out on Wednesday's shooting, asserting that the removal of police begets gun violence. "It could have been avoided if there was a cop there to prevent anything like this from happening or at least just scare the people that are committing crimes like these," the victim's sibling said.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/miacathell/2023/03/25/school-police-removed-violence-ensued-n2621048

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Bullies Rule Under Woke Discipline Policies

The term wokeness, now in common usage, is elusive, as language is evolving. For the left it’s an indication of one’s cultural sensitivity, a positive ethical stance. For the right, the term has moved from the realm of race-based discrimination to encompass a range of topics. In this latter vein, the term wokeness implies a consistent spirit of inverting truth and trying to get a population to swallow it.

The assertion that race is biologically determinative while biological genders mean nothing are two of the most scrutinized manifestations of the inversion technique. The left often declares that those who broach these topics are fueling a culture war, in a derogatory sense. The response to this should always be, “what is a culture war, and how do you know when somebody is engaging in one?”. It’s time for some honest introspection.

Another ongoing casualty of the spirit of inversion involves woke discipline polices, often presented under the guise of “restorative justice”. When the inversion is pure, injustice is justice, and bullies reign supreme, with the backing of the regime. While we have seen echoes of this play out in policing practices, I believe we are on the cusp of seeing a new parental movement emerge because of injustice playing out in schools. Indeed, numerous videos of terrible acts of violence at schools have been on the upswing in social media posts.

While youth behavior emerges from an ecosystem involving many variables, discipline policies represent a category of ideas which come about from adult leaders in charge. Sadly, many leaders still in charge of our K-12 school systems put their narrow ideological frameworks before evidence, sound reasoning, and the pleas of parents.

In the wake of the 2020 George Floyd murder, radicals in “edu-power” decided to move forward with the policies of their pseudo-sociological dreams, which may have otherwise been temporarily kept at bay. Following the “rules for radicals” playbook they didn’t waste a good crisis to further their goal of effectively playing God, whereby they name something into creation, say it is so, regardless of the realities bombarding their senses that suggest otherwise. Under the pretense of equity, it has been declared that disparities in discipline outcomes among black and brown students are the result of an all-pervasive societal racism. Furthermore, their imagined pre-societal state of nature for every person is sheer goodness.

Absent from this conception is the notion that individuals can choose bad things of their own volition. For these radicals, the disparities in suspensions and expulsions by any group can only be explained by the evils of society imposing a vision on a member of a group i.e., to suggest otherwise is merely a result of a mind corrupted by mainstream American culture. These pseudo-sociologists are effectively gnostic in this sense, declaring themselves to be the possessors of a hidden, and elite knowledge, which the hoi polloi need to be coached into.

The incidents of violence related to these policies are too many to name, but some stand out as particularly grave. Recently, a parent of a 6th grader in San Diego says her son was beaten and put in a chokehold unprovoked, and that this incident was completely preventable as the assailant had previously brought a bb gun on campus and was also found researching how to shoot students with a gun on a school issued computer. Her testimony in front of the San Diego Unified School Board goes, “This [restorative justice] policy has enabled and encouraged students’ behavior to become violent and aggressive… If you have not yet had someone, be a victim of this policy yet it will be happening soon and when it does you all of you can proudly look them in the eye and tell them you chose equity over their safety”. The testimonies surfacing appear to come from new groups of parents, many a-political, who never planned or imagined they would be speaking out at a school board meeting.

In February, a 14-year old new Jersey girl named Adriana Kuch took her life 2 days after a video of her being beaten surfaced and was widely distributed. The bullies had conspired to beat her well ahead of the incident, and simply targeted her while she was walking down the hall, several of them laughing as they approached her, watching her body crouch into a fetal position after being struck and dragged.

The human mind is so powerful that we can conceive of things as totally other than they are, and run away with these ideas, creating other worldly schemas. Perhaps something like this happens with the woke mind opiate. To respond in kind with reason has proven suspect, and rattling someone who is confused out of a trance through high level discourse often fails.

Rather than confront these issues strictly in the realm of theory and philosophy, perhaps the most fertile ground to bring others to confront these ideas takes place in the practical realm i.e. we need to get the confused to see the consequences of their ideas in action. For many, the denial will be ongoing, regardless of the evidence presented. Yet, there is always hope as the intellect is eternally ordered to truth, despite all attempts to kick and scream at it. What is called for is a shock back into reality. Here I’m reminded of the genius of the author Flannery O’Connor,

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it: when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing YOU SHOUT, and for the almost-blind, you DRAW LARGE AND STARTLING FIGURES.”

Large and startling figures are emerging in schools where the bullies have realized that nobody is coming for them. Now it’s time for parents to shout and draw them.

https://townhall.com/columnists/becca-williams/2023/03/25/bullies-rule-under-woke-discipline-policies-n2621105

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Australia's national curriculum substitutes emotion for hard learning

Occasionally our political representatives will say things which stand the test of time, but more than often, they do not. One example which springs to mind is a comment made in 2004 by the then federal education minister Julie Bishop, who optimistically proposed that the creation of a national curriculum would wrestle education out of the hands of the left-wing ideologues occupying state bureaucracies and give it to a national board of studies comprised of educators from the ‘sensible centre’.

Unfortunately, the Institute of Public Affairs’ new report on the latest iteration of the National Curriculum, De-Educating Australia: How the National Curriculum is Failing Australian Children reveals beyond a shadow of doubt that the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority (ACARA) is now irreversibly stacked with utopian activists who know that in order to change the world, you have to change what children are taught.

What is currently being unleashed in classrooms across this country is about as far away from a traditional curriculum as you can possibly get. Rather, it is an anarcho-political manifesto which seeks to dismantle the entire edifice of the modern state of Australia by undermining its values and institutions.

Children taught according to the dictates of this curriculum will finish school with a set of beliefs, a worldview and a sense of what it means to be Australian that are at odds with those which have previously been passed on to generations of Australians.

This document is indoctrinating the young and impressionable with radical theories about race and gender, which were once marginal academic ideas but have now become the pedagogy favoured by the progressive educationalists employed by the state.

Take critical race theory, for example. This American import is now interwoven into the arts, history, civics and citizenship learning areas. In the health and physical education syllabus students will ‘gain insights into the impact systemic racism and discrimination have had on Australian First Nations Peoples’.

The progressive educationalists are using their considerable institutional power to bring forth and legitimise radical ideas such as the notion that Australia is a fundamentally racist country, and that all of its institutions are smokescreens for racial domination. It introduces children to the fiction of ‘systemic racism’, as well as the racist concept of ‘whiteness’ being problematic.

Students studying Australia’s history will leave school convinced that Aboriginal Australians were not, and never have been, beneficiaries of the universal rights afforded to all Australians that were brought by the British to this country in 1788. In year 9 history, students will study ‘potential barriers to equality of access to justice, such as education and literacy, location and proximity to legal avenues, financial constraints, race or ethnicity especially for First Nations Australians’. At the same time, the curriculum teaches that the source of Aboriginal Australians’ rights is different from that of non-Aboriginal Australians, the implication being that Aboriginal Australians are in some way legally separate from other Australians. In the years 7 to 10 arts syllabus, for example, students are informed that, ‘First Nations Australian cultures have internationally enshrined rights to ensure that these diverse cultures can be maintained, controlled, protected and developed’. They will also be taught about ‘rights relating to Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property and how these rights can be protected through respectful application of protocols’. We should hardly be surprised that in a recent YouGov poll, 64 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds were in favour of establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament.

In the meantime, the ‘Sustainability Cross Curriculum’ priority is doing significant damage to Australia’s youth. It has become the gateway through which children are being introduced to concepts and ideologies that have nothing to do with looking after the environment in the true sense. They are schooled in environmental determinism, which is the concept that humans and their natural environment are interrelated, and that environmental factors such as climate change presuppose the success or failure of civilisations. The priority promotes the idea that a sustainable world cannot be achieved without a socially just world, and that the two are inextricably linked. Children are repeatedly asked to ‘recognise that the interdependence of Earth’s systems and values of diversity, equity and social justice are essential for achieving sustainability’.

In every learning area, they are bombarded with the view that society is not progressing towards greater wealth, prosperity, and improvement in the human condition, but that because of our attachment to plastic straws and bad recycling habits, we are careering headlong towards an environmental cataclysm. We should also not be surprised that young Australians are suffering from severe bouts of ‘eco-anxiety’.

This is placing an extremely unfair burden on young Australians. On the one hand, they are being fed the current prognosis of the ‘scientific consensus’ that every day of inaction brings us closer to catastrophe, while on the other they are being told that only they can avert that catastrophe through activism. In ‘foundation arts’, we see four-year-olds rapping about climate change. Eight-year-olds are ‘identifying ways they can change their behaviours to support the sustainability of the Earth’s systems’ in health and physical education. Students of French are organising real protests and rallies to ‘raise awareness of environmental, social or ethical issues’, and year 7 science students are writing letters to editors of newspapers to ‘express a view about an environmental issue affecting local ecosystems’.

Children are repeatedly informed that they are global citizens and that the global problems are theirs to solve, yet the curriculum does not even give them the basic literacy and numeracy skills they need to flourish and live fulfilled lives, let alone tackle imagined problems of a global nature.

There is no doubt that the bureaucrats at ACARA have deliberately jettisoned the acquisition of knowledge and replaced it with pure, unadulterated emotion. They have created a curriculum that will elicit feelings of guilt about the past, anger about the present and sheer terror about the future. In this way, they are manipulating children for political gain. As Thomas Sowell notes, ‘there are few things more dishonourable than misleading the young’.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/misleading-the-young/

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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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