Free Republic

ACTUAL TITLE: Justice Department sides with 14-year-old girl raped while serving as 'bait' in middle school sting HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- The federal government today sided with the guardian of a teenage girl who was raped during a botched sting operation in the boy's bathroom, arguing the Madison County School system was liable under federal law to investigate harassment and protect female students. "A school board cannot avoid summary judgment as a matter of law when a school administrator willfully ignores a plan to use a 14-year-old special needs student as bait to catch a student with a known history of...

An eighth grade student from Weaverville Elementary School got a detention slip for sharing his school prepared lunch Tuesday.Kyle Bradford, 13, shared his chicken burrito with a friend who didn’t like the cheese sandwich he was given by the cafeteria.Bradford didn’t see any problem with sharing his food."It seemed like he couldn't get a normal lunch so I just wanted to give mine to him because I wasn't really that hungry and it was just going to go in the garbage if I didn't eat it," said Bradford.But the Trinity Alps Unified School District has regulations that prohibit students from...

A “suspicious” looking middle school student with a “green military-type jacket” sent a Connecticut school into lockdown for two hours Tuesday. A school staff member alerted school authorities to a suspicious man roaming the school hallway, describing the person as roughly 5 feet 7 inches and wearing a green military-type jacket. School officials relayed the possible threat to police, who issued a lockdown around 11 a.m., NBC reports.“Officers searched the John F. Kennedy Middle School and its surrounding grounds, but police said the initial search ‘revealed nothing of a suspicious nature,’” WFSB.com reports.The school district alerted parents of the lockdown,...

Mayor Rahm Emanuel backed off Thursday from naming a new elite high school after President Barack Obama amid ongoing criticism from African-Americans who felt the honor inappropriate for a school slated for a wealthy, predominantly white part of the Near North Side. Instead of naming the new school after his former boss, the mayor indicated he would consider other names for the selective enrollment high school set to be built near the site of the former Cabrini-Green public housing project just northwest of downtown.

I blogged about the case in February, when the Ninth Circuit panel opinion came down; here’s an excerpt, which summarizes the issue: Today’s Dariano v. Morgan Hill Unified School Dist. (9th Cir. Feb. 27, 2014) upholds a California high school’s decision to forbid students from wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo. (See here and here for more on this case.) The court points out that the rights of students in public high schools are limited — under the Supreme Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Comm. School Dist. (1969), student speech could be restricted if “school...

SARASOTA, Fla. – The uproar over Common Core has created misinformation and serious concerns as to its efficacy. To clear up the confusion, once and for all, we must look at the birth of Common Core to see the vision guiding its mission. However noble Common Core may sound, it is but a host carrier for a radical disease that must be exposed. commoncoreappleCommon Core’s roots date to 2007 when David Coleman and Jason Zimba wrote: Math and Science Standards That Are Fewer, Clearer, Higher to Raise Achievement at All Levels. The paper outlined a proposal to solve the math...

According to a Teach for America website, culturally responsive teaching in math is important because “math has traditionally been seen as the domain of old, White men.” white privilege and prejudiceAs reported earlier this week, Teach for America groups across the country are committing themselves to “culturally responsive teaching,” a radical pedagogy used by communist Bill Ayers and other blatant anti-American indoctrinators. The site, Culturally Responsive Teaching, Teach for America, says that because math is seen as a domain for old, white men, many students cannot identify with it. Therefore, educators should find ways to relate math to the lives...

A former student at the elite Horace Mann School in The Bronx says his pedophile English teacher bragged about driving 12 kids to suicide — and vowed to make him the 13th. “You will join a long list of willful children who lashed out and then couldn’t make it on their own,” Robert Berman told one of his teen victims, Stephen Fife, according to Fife’s upcoming memoir, “The 13th Boy: A Memoir of Education and Abuse.”

The Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts-based think tank, released a new study, “The Revenge of K-12: How Common Core and the New SAT Lower College Standards in the U.S.” to help parents, teachers, and policymakers understand the problems with the Common Core State Standards. Authors Robert Phelps and Common Core Validation Committee member R. James Milgram go in-depth on the background of the Common Core standards and the qualifications (or lack thereof) of the writers of the standards. Milgram, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Stanford University, was one of five members of the validation committee who refused to sign onto...

In what may be the ultimate Nanny State move, Vermont has outlawed consuming or bringing brownies, cakes, or cookies to school. The mandates are part of a new program titled “Smart-Snacks-in-Schools” and will apply to lunch items, vending machines, and fundraising events between midnight and half and hour after school. Boston.com reported:

Once upon a time, there was a red crayon that could only draw blue: blue fire engines, blue strawberries, blue hearts—all things we know to be red he could only draw in blue. No matter how hard the crayon tried, no matter how critical the remarks of others, the crayon couldn't behave in accordance with the label on his side. "He was red, but he wasn't very good at it," Michael Hall explains in "Red: A Crayon's Story," a forthcoming picture book that reads like a fable of gender identity. "I have a girl brain but a boy body," says...

A news story has been making the rounds about a ridiculous elementary school regulation against students’ use of lip balm. A fifth-grader named Grace Karaffa requested some Chapstick while on the playground and was denied.Eleven year-old Grace started a petition to allow Stuarts Draft Elementary School students to use the product and gained 236 signatures before testifying to the school board.She explained, “I was told I couldn’t use it. Then later that day, they started to bleed so I asked for Chapstick again and I was told that it was against the school policy for elementary kids to have Chapstick.”The...

It looks like the days of trading half of your peanut butter and jelly sandwich for half of your best friend’s ham sandwich may soon be over if the federal government has anything to do with it. A Richmond, Virginia mother received the following note, telling her not to pack a lunch for her pre-school age child. Dear Parents, I have received word from Federal Programs Preschool pertaining to lunches from home. Parents are to be informed that students can only bring lunches from home if there is a medical condition requiring a specific diet, along with a physicians note...

Chloe Rubiano is an 8th grader at Ramey Junior High in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She wore a shirt to school that says 'Virginity Rocks'. She got the shirt at a Christian festival last year. She said, she didn't think anyone would really make a big deal out of it. She wore it at her old school but at Ramay Junior High she was told it would disrupt the classroom.. When she was called to the office Chloe said the administration was worried her shirt would start sexual conversations in class. She said her vice principal told her, 'I love the shirt,...

Besser warned parents to watch out for symptoms of coughs and wheezing among their children, especially if their children are asthmatic. "The best approach for prevention is what we talk about all the time for respiratory infections, colds, and flus and that's really good hand washing," Besser said. ... Children who contract enterovirus D68 first suffer from what appears to be a common cold, with symptoms including a runny nose, coughing, and sneezing, according to Besser. The symptoms then escalate to difficulty breathing. Besser said parents should look out for their children exhibiting signs of wheezing, difficulty eating or speaking,...

Dozens of young redheaded men and women are replacing the ritual bullying of the playground with the ritual strictures of radical Islam, perhaps – at least according to some experts – as a result of the bullying and persecution they endure early in life. You’ve likely already made the connection between ginger hair and home-grown Islamic radicals yourself. Subconsciously, perhaps, from newspaper reports showing carrot-topped wannabe jihadis from Bradford, and TV clips of auburn brothers in east London. What you probably don’t know is just how vastly over-represented redheads are in the ranks of Islamist converts. There are no surveys...

Avoiding another Murrieta is the driving reason behind the Obama Administration secretly inserting thousands of illegal children (UACs) into school districts nationwide as a new school year begins. The fact that many districts are hard pressed to handle their own children is of no particular concern to the Regime. Four states– TX, CA, FL, and VA show up on a Numbers USA code map as having received the brunt of the 37,477 UACs so far this year. (1) Transparency, an empty campaign word Obama used way back in ’08 to vault into America’s White House, is a joke. Children entering...

7 On Your Side was contacted by several upset parents who say Woodruff High School students were made to take down American flags from their vehicles on 9/11. Spartanburg District 4 Superintendent Rallie Liston said four students arrived at the school Thursday morning with U.S. flags propped up on poles in their pickup truck beds. The school's principal, Aaron Fulmer, confiscated the flags because he said it is against district policy to “draw attention,” to one's vehicle. The flags were returned to the students at the end of the day.

A New Jersey teacher has been charged with possession and distribution of child pornography. Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinari announced the arrest of 23-year-old Oradell resident Rachel Permut. The woman is being charged with one count of distribution of child pornography and one count of endangering the welfare of a child.

ORLANDO -- Health officials say there’s only been about 100 confirmed cases of the upper-respiratory Enterovirus D68 since it was identified in the 1960s. But in the past few weeks, hundreds of children in at least 12 states have been hospitalized with a serious respiratory infection, and doctors believe it’s a resurgence of the virus. The early symptoms of EV-D68 are much like the common cold. Doctors said this virus can last longer, and cause major breathing problems, especially in children with asthma. “Even patients with no prior respiratory illnesses, this virus has caused some asthma-like symptoms,” said Dr. Federico...