Free Republic

A resource officer may have prevented a massacre after a 19-year-old former student allegedly brought a gun inside an Illinois school and opened fire. The suspect shot at the Dixon High School resource officer, who returned fire and struck the gunman, City Administrator Danny Langloss said. The officer was not hit by gunfire and the suspect had non-life threatening injuries. No students or staff members were injured in the incident. The suspect was placed in police custody.

Two parents whose daughters were killed in the February school shooting in Parkland, Fla., are running for two seats on the county school board. Lori Alhadeff and Ryan Petty, whose daughters Alyssa Alhadeff and Alaina Petty were two of the 17 people killed at Marjory Stoneman... Both campaigns are linked to Broward Parents for Better and Safer Schools, a political action committee led by Democratic consultants that was set up after the shooting.

The most remarkable thing about the title of this column, “Cornell student presents senior thesis in her underwear” is that not one reader thinks it’s a joke. That, my friends, is further proof of the low esteem in which most Americans hold our universities. The left has rendered our universities, in the description of Harvard Professor Steven Pinker, a laughingstock. As reported in the Cornell Sun and then around the world, this is what actually happened last week at Cornell University, one of our “Ivy League” universities: Letitia Chai, a Cornell senior, presented a trial run of her college scholar...

Students at the University of Michigan, beware. If you say anything politically incorrect or out-of-line with the political and social orthodoxy on your campus, you may get a knock on your dorm room door from the university’s equivalent of the Thought Police, and be forced into a re-education camp. Or you may be suspended or thrown out of school, potentially damaging your educational prospects and your entire future professional career. If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider a new lawsuit filed in federal court in Michigan by Speech First, Inc., against the president of the University of Michigan, other...

As part of its Spring 2018 regulatory agenda released on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education signaled that it is considering rule amendments to expand the eligibility of faith-based institutions for federal grants. In a release titled Eligibility of Faith-Based Entities and Activities, DOE said: Various provisions of the Department’s regulations regarding the eligibility of faith-based entities to obtain grants from the Department or to participate in State-administered programs and the activities that they may perform unnecessarily restrict participation by religious entities in the Department’s grant programs by including requirements specific to such entities.

Dave Perry in a screenshot from the Project Veritas video. HAMILTON >> The Hamilton teachers union boss who got suspended for making inappropriate comments to an undercover Project Veritas newswoman has stepped aside. “I can confirm that David Perry resigned as HTEA president effective Thursday, May 3,” a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association said Friday via email. ... snip ... Some of Perry’s eyebrow-raising quotes during the encounter on March 27 were: “I’m not here to hurt anybody. I’m here to defend. No matter, the worst teachers in the world, I have defended.” “I got people who are...

The he Broward school district’s repeated, emphatic — and it turns out, false — statements that Nikolas Cruz had not been in a controversial disciplinary program fit a pattern of an institution on the defensive and under siege. Facing significant legal and political exposure over the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the district has tried to keep information from the public and put out untrue and misleading statements, frustrating parents who say this is the time for maximum transparency.

People hate Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. When she spoke at the Kennedy School of Government, students held up signs calling her a "white supremacist." When she tried to visit a school, activists physically blocked her way. The haters claim DeVos knows little about education, only got her job because she gave money to Republican politicians, and hates free public education. Of course, education isn't really "free." Taxpayers spend $634 billion a year on it. It's laughable that activists claim conservatives "cut" education spending. Funds per student tripled over the past several decades, while test scores stayed flat. Some of...

New York Democrat Linda Rosenthal introduced legislation to ban shooting sports from New York schools Friday, claiming the sports “spread gun culture.” If the legislation is passed, high school shooting teams, including air rifle and even archery clubs, would be disbanded, Time magazine reported on Thursday. These programs can lead to violence, Rosenthal claimed, citing the Parkland shooter’s involvement in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program before executing his mass killing. “Schools should not be supporting the spread of gun culture in society,” Rosenthal told reporters. “If parents want their children to have shooting instruction, there are opportunities...

“Open Mic” night May 2 at the SUNY Oswego Lifestyles Center turned out to not be so open after all. Taking the title at face value, conservative student Nicole Miller gave a speech about liberal intolerance on campus and — wait for it — got put on warning for making other students “uncomfortable.” The school’s Alcohol and Other Drugs Program coordinator, Trisha DeWolf, emailed Miller to say that if she did it again, she’d be banned from future open-mic events. (Kudos to the website Campus Reform for publicizing the remarkable missive.) While insisting she was “in support of [Miller’s] freedom...

Refugees’ long, dangerous journey from the world’s most isolated country doesn’t end when they arrive in Seoul. Kim Sung-chul escaped North Korea four times. The first time he left his home in rural Musan with his mother, he was just 17 years old. But a year into living in a foreign land — amid the icy villages of far northeast China — he caved into his homesickness. In the dead of winter, North Korean soldiers discovered him hiding in the freezing Tumen River separating the two countries, and pulled him out of the reeds. After another aborted escape, he was...

Art teacher Stacy Bailey was twice selected Teacher of the Year at her Texas elementary school, where she started in 2008, but after she showed her students a photo of her and her then-girlfriend, she was placed on administrative leave. Now, Bailey is suing the district for discrimination. “Stacy is filing this lawsuit and taking this action in hopes of pushing Mansfield [Independent School District] out of the shadows of discrimination and into the sunshine of equal rights,” her attorney, Jason Smith, told NBC 5 in Dallas. Bailey’s lawsuit was filed Tuesday in federal court and lists the Mansfield Independent...

White racism must be everywhere for the Racism-Industrial-Complex to function George Yancy is a black professor of philosophy at Emory University whose research interests are almost entirely racially-oriented. Recently, he published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America.”  In response to “Dear White America,” an op-ed that Yancy had published in The New York Times and in which he implored whites—all whites—to accept that they are “racist,” Yancy claims in his most recent editorial to have been besieged by emails, letters, and phone messages filled with “racist hatred.” ...

The truth has come to light regarding the failure of Broward county fake leadership and the lies they told regarding the Obama era instituted "Promise" program. You know, the program where juvenile deliquents get a "second chance" in schools. The program Scott Israel said was awesome but that Broward school superintendent insisted was not a part of Nikolas Cruz's world. Now the Miami media, thanks to dogged journalistic inquisitiveness (oh, wait, no, it was a statement of culpability released quietly by the school district) is now reporting the truth. The truth is that Nikolas Cruz WAS referred to the program....

In 2007, I sat down for a brief interview with an FBI agent. While we sat in a coffee shop in Wilmington, North Carolina, I outlined the case against Professor Julio Pino of Kent State University. My accusations were serious but irrefutable: Julio Pino was an Islamic jihadist who was actively conspiring with other terrorists seeking to murder American troops and innocent civilians. The FBI eventually got Pino. Unfortunately, it took them eleven years during which Ohio taxpayers were forced to pay the salary of a man who was openly planning to wage war on his own country.When Pino finally...

Public schools need more truth, not less.The aftermath of my recent life-affirming presentation at Vicksburg High School in Michigan showed that some leaders don’t believe honesty is the best policy. Despite some incredible feedback from students, parents and even teachers, the school decided to cower to a vocal minority of students and parents who detest who I am. Contrary to the school district’s dishonest public statement, it wasn’t what was said at the assembly that caused the negative reaction. It was that some, who took to social media to protest me, discovered (gasp!) that I’m a Christian with a Biblical worldview...

Several African American graduates at the University of Florida are speaking out after a white faculty member forcibly rushed them off stage at one of the school's commencement ceremonies on Saturday. The students said they were observing a long-held tradition among black fraternities and "strolling" after getting their college degrees when the usher grabbed them and roughly shoved them along. University of Florida President W. Kent Fuchs apologized after videos of the incidents went viral online.

Your free speech rights can be violated by nearly anyone, as can your right to freely associate. But though almost anyone can violate your rights, no one may do so. And the modern idea has been that governments ought to protect our rights. Unfortunately, politically-motivated mobs have recently decided that they “are” government, or that they get to redefine our rights . . . by violating them. And governments and other established authorities have not been consistently coming to our aid. Last month, libertarian-conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulis went into the Churchill Tavern in New York to dine with a fellow...

When I started out in education, the teachers union reps would tell me, “We are here to protect you.” However, what I learned on the job—and after leaving the profession altogether—is that unions protect unions, not the individual workers, and definitely not the kids. In many states, first-year teachers pay the union dues, even if they do not formally join the union, but get no protection. The classic phrase among veteran teachers is “you can be fired for the cut of your hair.” As for the core interests of these public sector legal mobs, teachers’ union strikes have erupted all...

The Palm Beach County School District has abruptly canceled a Monday night school safety forum after receiving complaints that it appeared to be related to gun-control events organized by Parkland students...