Board of Education Resolutions 

Author:  R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D    

As I have mentioned in prior articles, the local Boards of Education are the only elected body that we have direct influence over when it comes to our county public school systems. The State Board of Education is made up of appointed members. It is incumbent on us to make sure that the local Boards of Education members know how we want the schools to operate. We can let them know by attending the Board meetings, contacting individual board members, or by formal resolutions directing them to take specific actions.  An example of the latter is the four resolutions that will be presented to the Craven County Board of Election on Thursday November 16 at their public meeting.    

The four resolutions consist of the following:  Resolution #1:   Removing identity focus (i.e. Critical Race Theory) from the curriculum in the schools in all grades. Removing all books, etc., that advocate CRT.  American is not a racist country and should not be portrayed as such. People should be judged by the content of their character and achievement and not their ethnic/racial identity.  Resolution #2:  Removing Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) teaching and practices from the schools. DEI is based on Marxist principles that advocate equal outcome instead of the American principle of equal opportunity. This teaching not only breeds distrust and hostility between the races, but undermines the notion that everyone should strive to achieve their best and should be rewarded appropriately.  Resolution #3:  Removing transgender instruction. The notion that any student can choose their gender rather than live consistent with their gender at birth is destructive and amounts to child abuse.  All children should be addressed by the pronoun consistent with their biological gender at birth and any child exhibiting gender confusion should be referred to their parent(s)–not to school counselors.  Resoution #4:   Climate Change. Children in public school are being indoctrinated with the unproven belief that climate change is being caused by man’s burning of fossil fuels and that the earth will become uninhabitable if drastic action like wind and solar are not implemented. This has become the ideology of the Left and anyone challenging their radical beliefs is labeled a “climate denier”.  This resolution would require that both sides of this issue be covered as part of regular science classes and not used as indoctrination. The climate has never been static and has always been changing. They are frightening our children with their unproven ideology. 

Most clear thinking conservatives will agree that the above issues need to be removed from the public schools. They represent a communist inspired threat to our way of life and American values. The public schools should be focusing on doing a better job teaching traditional academic skills.  For example, the recent report about the Craven County Schools showed that 57% of students are not reading at expected grade level and a whopping 65% are not achieving at the expected grade levels in math. Meanwhile, it is costing the  taxpayers close to $12,000 per year per student. It is high time that the Board of Education force the school administration to focus on improving academic performance and stop indoctrinating our children.  If you agree you should let your Board member know. It should be noted that these four resolutions were drafted by the Craven County 20th Republican Precinct, and endorsed by the Craven County GOP Executive Committee and the Craven County Republican Men’s Club.     

The Quote Of The Week

It’s only Wednesday, and I have already found the quote of the week. It’s found in today’s Washington Examiner.

Here is the quote:

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe (Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe) said in response to Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, who argued parents should be more involved in the decisions of local school districts. “I’m not going to let parents come into schools, and actually take books out, and make their own decision.”

Theoretically school boards are answerable to the voters who elect them. Many of those voters are parents with children in the schools. As far as taking books out, that depends. On August 3rd, CBN reported on a parent reading passages from books in a school library to the school board. The passages would be considered pornographic by most people. Why are we exposing our children to this? Shouldn’t the books involved be removed?

The article concludes:

None of this should come as a surprise to parents familiar with the public school system and the educators in control of it. These people want to use education as a means to turn impressionable young children into the next generation of leftist activists, and they have become increasingly hostile to any parental attempts to stop it. Parents who protest the teaching of critical race theory in schools have been smeared as “racists.” And parents who oppose the transgender ideology and the way in which it has been implemented into public schools are intentionally kept in the dark by educators and even risk losing custody of their children if they try to push back.

How children are raised and what they are taught is entirely up to the parents, not to the education establishment and its leftist enablers. McAuliffe, if elected, would clearly aim to crack down on parental rights so public schools can fill students’ heads with whatever they wish without facing any consequences. Is that the kind of governor Virginians want?

It might be a good idea to bring the children of the next generation up with the values that made this country great–not expose them to things that are simply not healthy.

 

An Interesting Relationship With The Truth

In 1996, Fordham’s Law Review celebrated Elizabeth Warren as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color.” That was because Ms. Warren had listed her heritage as Native American. Later DNA tests proved that this was not true. The latest tale told by Ms. Warren involves why she left teaching.

The Washington Free Beacon posted an article today that includes public records that indicate that Ms. Warren was not fired from teaching because she was visibly pregnant, but rather that the Riverdale Board of Education offered her a contract to continue what she had been doing. The minutes of the meeting are included in the article.

The article reports:

Toward the end of Warren’s first year on the job, in April 1971, the board approved her contract for the following school year, the meeting minutes show. Two months later, the meeting minutes indicate that Warren had tendered her resignation.

“The resignation of Mrs. Elizabeth Warren, speech correctionist effective June 30, 1971 was accepted with regret,” the June 16, 1971, minutes say.

There are no further mentions of Warren in Riverdale Board of Education meeting minutes, according to a spokesman for the board.

Scrutiny of Warren’s explanation for her jump from teaching to law comes months after the Massachusetts senator steadied her campaign after a rocky start.

In October, two months before her campaign launch, Warren executed a botched attempt to put questions about her claims to Native American heritage behind her by releasing the results of a DNA test. The results, which showed she has minimal Cherokee ancestry, did little to quell the controversy.

She went on to issue a public apology for taking the test in the first place.

“I have listened, and I have learned a lot. And I’m grateful for the many conversations we’ve had together,” Warren told a Native American audience in Iowa in mid-August.

Though many on both sides of the aisle counted her out due to her handling of the issue, Warren has managed not only to bounce back but to climb to the top of the field. Even President Donald Trump, who savaged Warren for her attempt to claim Native American ancestry, has said publicly he regrets drawing attention to her early on given that she has managed prevail—at least thus far.

“I did the Pocahontas thing,” Trump said to supporters at an August rally. “I hit her really hard and it looked like she was down and out but that was too long ago, I should’ve waited.”

If white privilege exists, why did Elizabeth Warren claim to be a Native American to advance her career?

Purposely Ignoring The Obvious

On Friday, CNS News reported that Chicago Public Schools have announced that all students and teachers will have access to whichever locker rooms and other spaces that were formerly reserved for one sex. This means that any teenage boy who wants to undress in the girls‘ locker room is free to do so. It also means that girls only health classes dealing with feminine issues are a thing of the past in Chicago.

The article reports:

In a weak acknowledgement of the uproar this will cause, the Chicago Public Schools says students that are not gender confused “should” be allowed access to alternative facilities. So, for example, if there are fifty girls who object to a boy undressing in front of them, it is the fifty girls, not the boy, who must go change in “single stall restrooms” elsewhere. Of course, the odds are high that school officials on the lookout for any sign of “bullying” will take careful note of which students leave the locker rooms, presuming they are allowed to leave at all.

To add to the confusion, the definition of gender identity changes about every three months, so the rules we are supposed to live by are constantly moving. But the latest definition, according to the Chicago Public Schools, is that sex is merely “a label a person is assigned at birth” and that the reality lies in one’s internal “psychological knowledge” of their own gender “regardless of the[ir] biological sex.”

At what point does common sense make an appearance?

The article concludes:

And therein lies the biggest affront from these new policies. Not only must government employees play along with a gender confused child’s every subjective wish, so must every other student. In fact, the Chicago Public Schools specify that students must address a gender confused child by whatever pronoun they wish, be it “they, their, ze, he and she.” Failure to do so “will result in appropriate consequences for offending staff and students,” in other words, discipline up to and including expulsion from school.

But many people of good will and faith conviction will simply refuse to put aside their legitimate privacy, modesty, and safety concerns. Many children of good will resist being forced to say “she” when speaking of a boy they have known for years just as they would resist being forced to say “5” when asked “what does 2+2 equal?

The left for years claimed that all they wanted was for LGBT persons to be left alone but this was a lie. It is now clear that liberals and their enablers will not leave anyone alone and will use the full force of courts, lawsuits, and government to ensure any resistance to their new gender ideology “will result in appropriate consequences.”

I think I would continue my school day sweaty and smelly rather than take a chance and dress in the locker room under the new rules. What are we doing to our children?

A School Board Doing Its Job

MetroWest Daily News (Massachusetts) posted an article today about the Lincoln-Sudbury School Board‘s decision to decline a chance to offer the PARCC to students next spring, sharply criticizing the standardized test that could end up replacing the MCAS in the state. The PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) is the testing that is part of the Common Core standards.

The article reports:

One board member equated the trial run of the exam as making “guinea pigs” out of students, whom he said wouldn’t see any worthwhile benefit from the dozens of hours they would put into practicing for and taking the test.

Lincoln-Sudbury, like all public high schools in Massachusetts, had a choice to administer the PARCC, short for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, in ninth and 11th grade later this year. The new test, which was introduced in a small pilot roll-out this past spring, was developed by a consortium of states to closely conform to the new Common Core standards adopted by most schools in the nation.

…Several committee members also bemoaned the PARCC’s potential effect of putting increased emphasis on standardized testing, arguing Lincoln-Sudbury on its own is able to come up with much more effective measures of students’ grasp of learning standards.

According to greatschools.org, Lincoln-Sudbury schools are rated a 9 out of 10. The School Board in Lincoln-Sudbury is obviously doing a good job. The median income in the town is $142,614, the median home price is $625,000, and the population is 17,673.

The School Board in the town understands that the Common Core standards have not been tested and there is no proof that they will improve the academic performance of our students. MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) testing is a proven product that has brought up the level of academic achievement of Massachusetts students. There is no reason to swap something that has proven to be effective for something that is totally untested.

The Education Our Children Are Not Getting

Yesterday the Independent Journal Review posted an article about a high school student using the internet to prepare for a debate. Student debates are a really good thing–I think they give students a chance to evaluate issues and form opinions based on both sides of the argument. But wait, about that both sides of the argument part.

The article reports:

Andrew Lampart, a senior at Nonnewaug High School in Connecticut, made an unsettling discovery while doing research for a class debate on gun control.

When he couldn’t access the NRA’s homepage, he decided to check what other sites the school had blocked. Lampart said, “I went over on sites such as Moms Demand Action or Newtown Action Alliance and I could get on these Web sites but not the others.”

He also found that pro-life sites were blocked by the school’s firewall while pro-choice websites like Plannned Parenthood were not. He even found that Christianity.com couldn’t be accessed, but Islam-guide.com was readily available.

Please follow the link above to the Independent Journal Review to see the list of websites the school allowed and those it blocked.

The Board of Education commented:

The Board of Education Chairman, John Chapman, emailed Fox CT to say, “the Board appreciated hearing the comments from Andrew and agree that he has raised an important issue that warrants further investigation.”

Meanwhile, I wonder how the student is supposed to prepare for the debate.