I remember how it was -- JR
This liberal university disarmed its police after the 2020 riots. Now they're reversing course
Portland State University has quietly returned guns to its campus police force, nearly three years after the anti-police protests and riots that drove the Oregon school to disarm security officers.
"Unfortunately, the environment around the PSU campus has changed since that time," the university's president Stephen Percy wrote Tuesday in an announcement.
Percy cited rising crime, an increase in weapons near campus and lack of support from the Portland Police Bureau for the policy change.
Student activists had lobbied for years to have campus police disarmed. Calls intensified in 2018 after campus police shot and killed Navy veteran Jason Washington as he tried to break up a fight outside a bar.
But it wasn't until the height of the 2020 protests, which raged for more than 100 consecutive nights, that Portland State announced its officers would stop routinely carrying guns on patrol.
"We can do an effective job without weapons," PSU campus safety chief Willi Halliburton told The Oregonian at the time. "I know they’re talented to do their jobs without the use of a weapon."
But then crime increased three years in a row across Portland. The city smashed its previous homicide record in 2021 and again last year. Many businesses have fled the city due to repeated burglaries and vandalism.
PSU reversed course on Feb. 14, according to The Oregonian, but didn't announce the change until this week.
"Recently, our officers encountered individuals on campus with weapons," Halliburton said. "This has made me make the hard decision to have more armed patrols on campus."
The college now has nine armed patrol officers, seven public safety officers and eight campus ambassadors, according to Halliburton.
"We have not abandoned unarmed patrols," he said. "You will see our officers respond to certain calls in an unarmed manner. This was done so at the officers' discretion and when it's safe."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/liberal-university-disarmed-police-2020-riots-now-reversing-course
************************************************************SUNY drops SAT, ACT testing requirement for admission
The State University of New York will no longer require students to take either the SAT and ACT tests to apply to its four-year undergraduate colleges as enrollment declines.
The SUNY board of trustees unanimously scrapped the admission test requirement — for decades a rite of passage for high school students applying to colleges — during a meeting this week.
Like many other higher education institutions, SUNY, which boasts being the largest comprehensive public university system in the US with 64 campuses throughout the state, had temporarily suspended the standardized testing requirements from 2020 through the 2023 academic years, citing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But SUNY Chancellor John King said the use of SAT and ACT test results for admission purposes should be nixed indefinitely.
“It is recommended that the current authorization for campuses to suspend the undergraduate admissions requirement to submit SAT and ACT scores be continued prospectively, with flexibility maintained for campuses (students may still submit standardized test scores if available),” King said in a resolution that was submitted to the governing board.
“Maintaining a test-optional policy is consistent with national trends at peer institutions.”
A survey conducted last fall by the National Center for Fair & Open Testing found that more than 80% of US bachelor-degree granting colleges did not require students seeking fall 2023 admission to submit either ACT or SAT standardized exam scores.
The University of California system also will not consider ACT or SAT test scores for admissions decisions or the awarding of scholarships for any applicants.
“An overwhelming majority of undergraduate admissions offices now make selection decisions without relying on ACT/SAT results,” FairTest Executive Director Harry Feder said.
“These schools recognize that standardized test scores do not measure academic ‘merit.’ What they do assess quite accurately is family wealth, but that should not be the criteria for getting into college.”
Feder continued, “De-emphasizing standardized exam scores is a model that all of US education — from K-12 through graduate schools — should follow.”
Last month, New York’s Columbia University became the first ivy league school to make SAT and ACT tests optional for applicants.
SUNY’s enrollment has shrunk 20% over the last decade, though King did not cite the drop as a major factor in eliminating SAT-ACT scores for admissions.
He did say fewer New York State high school students are taking the SAT,” especially among historically underrepresented groups” — black and Latino students.
“Each SUNY campus will continue its longstanding commitment to a holistic review of student applications that includes grades, program of study, academic achievements, non-academic achievements, and other activities that allow for the evaluation of the potential success of a candidate for admission,” the chancellor said.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/13/suny-drops-sat-act-testing-requirement-for-admission/
*********************************************************‘Deeply Perverse’: California School Board ‘Turns Education on its Head’ in Transgender Vote; Faces Lawsuit
The Center for American Liberty has filed suit against the superintendent and school board members of the Chico Unified School District in Northern California on behalf of Chico parent Aurora Regino.
At an April 5 Chico Unified School Board meeting, Regino claimed that Chico Unified transitioned her daughter without her knowledge or consent. According to Regino, during a time of intense stress in which Regino’s father had died and she was battling breast cancer, her elementary school-age daughter sought help from a school “mental wellness” counselor.
Regino further claimed that her daughter, also known as A.S., told the counselor that she wanted to tell Regino about the counseling sessions and her struggles with her sexual identity—but the counselor ignored A.S. Regino stated that because Chico Unified kept her daughter’s struggles and mental health crisis from her, her daughter was left to face bullying and other trauma alone.
At this point during Regino’s statement, individuals who sat on either side of the aisle and wore pride flags behind Regino rolled their eyes.
Pro-LGBTQ+ protesters showed up en masse to the school board meeting in support of the hidden transgender policy. Lindsay Briggs, a professor of public health at California State University-Chico, posted a disturbing message on Twitter celebrating “So many beautiful, radical, queer babes” coming to Chico to support the board’s decision to keep the secretive policy. The image below the tweet depicts a woman aiming a pistol with the caption, “Not gay as in happy, but queer as in f— you.”
Briggs’ profile on Twitter depicts two fists with the caption “Queers Bash Back.”
Briggs led many of the pro-LGBTQ+ protesters in heckles and chants against concerned parents during the school board meeting. None of the school board members made an effort to maintain order or quiet down the hecklers.
Regino told the Center for American Liberty that the Chico Unified Board’s response underscores the need for the lawsuit:
I’m still in awe about what I saw last night and how the Board allowed people to heckle and bully parents who were speaking about the right to be involved in their own children’s lives. … This decision is devastating for parents not only here in our community but also across the country. The next step to fight back is legal action and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
Speaking to The Daily Signal, Jay Richards of The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society pointed out a critical flaw in Chico Unified’s policy of keeping parents in the dark:
This policy turns education on its head. Rather than treating parents as holding the primary authority for teaching children, which they may delegate to a school, this policy makes the educational the primary arbiter of a child’s education, and the parents as potential threats to that authority. It’s deeply perverse.
Like Chico Unified, many schools across the country that have enacted secretive transgender policies at the expense of parental rights. A March investigation from Parents Defending Education reported that almost 9,000 schools across all 50 states have policies in which parents are kept in the dark if their child is struggling with transgender-related mental health issues.
Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, criticized the push to hide “sensitive issues” from parents amid the current academic performance crisis. She told The Daily Signal:
Instead of developing plots to keep parents in the dark about sensitive issues pertaining to their children in school, the board should focus on getting the district back to basics. But sadly, parents shouldn’t hold their breath. The district system has long been beholden to powerful teachers unions like the National Education Association, an anti-parent special interest group whose modus operandi is looking out for the adults in the system and shielding public schools from any meaningful accountability to families.
While many states are in the process of passing legislation that would forbid public school districts from keeping parents in the dark concerning their child’s mental health, California has not yet passed such a bill. Instead, it has enshrined the “right” of a 12-year-old to withhold gender identity information from parents.
For states lacking parental rights laws, lawsuits appear to be the only answer for many parents. The Center for American Liberty is attempting to fill that gap.
“The Chico Unified School Board’s decision to keep the parental secrecy policy in place is a slap in the face to every parent whose child is under their care,” said the Center for American Liberty’s CEO, Harmeet Dhillon. “It makes a mockery of fundamental, constitutionally protected, parental rights and puts every child’s safety at risk. If the Board won’t rescind this unconstitutional policy, our lawsuit will prompt the court to do it for them.”
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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)
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http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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