Posted on 06/26/2008 8:25:06 PM PDT by buwaya
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And you just proved my original point: you’re ignorant.
Have a nice day.
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Yes I am Asian. So what ? My point is that these kids are absolutely not illegal aliens, or if any are, its a very tiny minority. JROTC here is mainly Asian.
It is a bfd. Lowell High, the top-rated academic high school which has the largest JROTC enrollment is a TOUGH place. These kids are doing all the AP’s they can. They don’t have room in their schedules for a non-academic elective. The other principal JROTC schools are in a similar position. Kill that PE thing and these kids will have to quit, and then the DOD will pull the funding, and then we will lose these kids, no counterweight at all to the liberal brainwashing.
“You don’t like how the government and school board function in your town, then change them.”
We are a minority, but we are here, we have a right to be here. You can go be idiotic about us in wherever you are comfortably planted among those you agree with. But the fight isn’t there, its here.
“you won’t find a whole lot of sympathy on boards like FReeRepublic”
Yeah, like the Filipino guerillas in WWII didn’t get sympathy from MacArthurs command ? Jeez, man, we are behind enemy lines, fighting the good fight. You don’t want to help ? Fine. But if you don’t the war is coming to you.
Okay, 2 questions: is there a state law that says JROTC can't count as PE anymore, as was suggested earlier, or is this purely a SF thing?
And is there any way you can rally those great kids and/or their parents to attend school board meetings, contact the media, and otherwise rally for the cause? I'm betting the kids are polite, neat, good looking and articulate and would make a great public impression.
It would be great if there were non-public-school JROTC affiliates. Boy Scouts is excellent, of course, but they don't drill. And I don't suppose Confederate reenacting is quite the same ...
” is there a state law that says JROTC can’t count as PE anymore, as was suggested earlier, or is this purely a SF thing?”
So far its purely an SF thing. The other side is trying to make it a state thing.
“And is there any way you can rally those great kids and/or their parents to attend school board meetings, contact the media, and otherwise rally for the cause? I’m betting the kids are polite, neat, good looking and articulate and would make a great public impression.”
They do. The SF JROTC kids and families regularly pack School Board meetings. That cuts no ice, the board members know who their voters are, and its not those people.
JROTC is public-school only I believe.
The good thing, generally, is that California school boards have very little authority. They don’t control taxes, most expenditures, curriculum, or even hiring/firing except at the very top.
They are mainly playpens for baby politicians. However, in this case they do have the authority.
Newsom has a lot wrong with him, the gay business being the worst, but as a fiscal and economic manager he is very conventional. That is why he is so popular in this city of hypocrites - he pleases the cultural left while on another level reassuringly acting like a Republican where it really matters to them.
My BIL and SIL live in Los Angeles (he is a WELS Lutheran missionary to inner city LA). They sent their kids out of the state for education to a boarding school. It's a tough situation. He felt called to the area, but in the process, it is difficult for his kids to live with them because of the violence, drugs, and general depravity of his field. One of the boys is living with my MIL this summer instead of home. It was felt it was safer there. Sad that any part of our country has devolved to that level.
Weirdly enough, in SF the public schools are to the RIGHT of the community. This is a very artificial community here, lots of unattached people without children, etc. There are very few families with kids in SF relatively speaking.
Families with children tend to be more conservative than single people.
And the kids (and parents) are heavily Asian and Hispanic, and so much more conservative culturally than most.
Even the teachers, though liberal, tend to be more conservative than the general population here.
Physically speaking, overall this is an extremely wealthy and safe community, its not the ghetto (other than our actual ghetto), far from it.
Thats a new opinion by our state superintendent of schools, a very leftish fellow.
Part of the conspiracy I believe.
JROTC is a great program, and I’m sorry to hear about it’s troubles. It helps build the leaders of tomorrow, not only for the military, but for the civilian world as well. Too bad the libs hate the military so much.
As you know, some of us have created small-scale private alternatives. We strive for high quality education, student and faculty accountability, parental involvement and as low cost as possible to encourage parents to make the sacrifice for what is offered as an alternative.
That is not proving sufficient when 90%+ of all primary and secondary students are enrolled in public schools. Our local public high school (decently funded, rural agricultural area a couple of dozen miles from Rockford) used to use Saxon Math but dropped it as too challenging for the students and also dropped geometry altogether. It has a chemistry teacher who (first rate though an atheist) tells me that she is only able to go on because of a small group of students who join her every morning an hour before school to indulge their enthusiasm for extra (non-credit) studies in chemistry.
This week, the Rockford newspaper published a credible letter from one public high school sophomore-to-be who took elementary German as a freshman but has no second year available because German is being canceled system-wide. The letter looked quite genuine and not a product of his teacher or parent being submitted in his name.
Where do we begin to clean up such situations? Most of what we see on TV, hear on radio or read in newspapers about Rockford's public schools describes the ongoing day-in, day-out gangfighting at the middle and high school levels, assaults on teachers, arbitrary programs to keep redesigning this school or that, relocating this program or that and the resultant parental complaints about anything whatsoever that they find inconvenient (seldom is heard a constructive academic complaint). Note that there enough activist conservative Christians in the community to deter "gay rights" clubs and what not but not enough to effectively organize for academic quality.
Whatever our differences from time to time, I do admire your perseverance in teaching in public schools. May God bless you and yours.
I believe that we are seeing the demise of our great country and the public schools are not the cause, but rather the canary. The problems of our culture are magnified and made plain in the public school system.
Name a problem in any public school in any district in this country and the answer is always parental supervision, parental protests, and/or parental representation at board meetings. Always, 100% of the time. I've personally seen the power of 15 parents up against a school board - changes can and do happen when parents band together and force changes in problems just as you mentioned. I know you all are in a Catholic school, but imagine if 20 parents showed up at every school board meeting, wrote to the local papers, and/or gathered petitions to put back any program - Saxon math, German, you name it, it can happen because of the power of numbers
There are some that call me a 'government school defender' and I'm not. But I will tell you what I am. I am a deep believer in getting my money's worth in my taxes. Until the day I can no longer participate, I will always be at board meetings watching and listening. I will volunteer on parent committees to review textbooks and materials. I will watch for evidence of the gay culture infiltrating my local high schools. I will do this not for my own children, because they are out of the system, but because I pay taxes for those schools and I demand excellence. I don't always see it, but I keep asking for it. As I've said before, I wish you and I lived near each other so that I could benefit from your experiences in creating small, but superb classrooms. Your success could be duplicated if enough parents wanted it badly enough.
The inner city schools are a different subject all together because of the culture of 'nanny-ism' and generational welfare. Unfortunately as bad as they are, the public schools are sometimes the best thing going on for kids. How incredibly sad is that? The only person that shows a kid love is a teacher they have for 10 months?
You mention TV and that is another problem - if it bleeds, it leads and bad news about public schools sells papers and keeps viewers watching. I trust letters to the editor more than any MSM newscast. I've almost stopped watching any news cast because of the intense bias and hatred for anything good and the glee of reporting bad news.
The future of our country rests on the shoulders of conservatives. We must protect our own children and help those that we can with real life efforts, not just preaching to the choir. You are saving kids in your community every day, and I'm doing my best in my small corner of the world. I just wish we had more help.
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