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The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) released their annual school report cards this week, and the results show that two taxpayer-financed Islamic charter schools operated by officials of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have failed miserably yet again. But protected by powerful political connections, including Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman, and apparently indifferent to their exploitation of the Somali children that comprise the vast majority of their students, the Islamic extremists running the operation appear to have no fear of losing their cash cows. In fact, Ohio educrats have renewed one school’s contract after five...

I just found out late last night that my local public high school is not saying the Pledge of Allegiance at any point during the school day. Is this the norm?? This information came to me via a foreign exchange student we are hosting who is in her senior year of high school at our local public institution. We were talking about her first week of school which commenced 8/27 and she said they have not done the pledge even once yet! She knew what it was, she knows the words - she learned them before coming here. But her...

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit on behalf of two high school students who say they are offended by the school's policy of allowing prayer at voluntary events and holding Christmas concerts at churches. The students, from Pace High School in Pace, Fla., are identified only as Minor I Doe and Minor II Doe in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court because they are both under 18. The complaint alleges disclosure of their names would put the students at risk of "social ostracism, economic injury, governmental retaliation … and potential physical harm." Benjamin Stevenson, staff...

The citizens of the world who hate America are going to love the latest agitprop released this week by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. In a document titled "A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in U.S. Public Schools," the left-wing groups seek to paint a horrifying portrait of the nation's classrooms as Abu Ghraib-like torture chambers. The report compiles sob stories of students humiliated after being disciplined by school officials for unruliness, and claims that minority students are "disproportionately targeted" for punishment. Citing international law and threatening lawsuits, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU are...

Mass school shootings in America and around the world have had a number of common threads, starting with the mental/social defects who had little difficulty getting around gun-control laws and even less trouble penetrating schools' security schemes. For years, efforts to prevent mass school shootings have had a number of common threads, too, starting with strictly enforced unilateral-disarmament policies that were widely publicized and almost universally acclaimed. The approach was modeled after the crime-fighting strategy employed by society at large, which disarms law-abiding citizens and thereby makes them the defenseless marks of gun-toting criminals. Very few in education ever make...

HAYWARD — Walking to and from school has been a nightmare for Amoni Packnett, an eighth-grader at Cesar Chavez Middle School. The 13-year-old and other girls are the target of daily whistles and hard stares from day laborers, who often also stalk the girls, along Tennyson Road in south Hayward. "It can get uncomfortable, and I feel violated," Packnett said. "We just want something to be done to prevent this from happening again." Helping children feel safe along a stretch from Ruus Road to the railroad tracks on Tennyson Road — an area dominated by day laborers — was the...

ANN ARBOR, MI — Today, July 31st at 10:00AM EST, a New Jersey Federal Court heard oral arguments in a legal challenge to a public school district’s policy totally banning Christmas music, including simple instrumentals without words, during year-end celebrations in its schools. The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan filed the federal lawsuit on the grounds that the school district’s ban on religious music conveys a government-sponsored message of disapproval and hostility toward religion in violation of the Establishment Clause. Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Law Center,...

Only a year after banning all negative messages about homosexuality in public schools throughout the state, the California Legislature now is ordering school children to celebrate "gay" lifestyle choices. "If signed into law, AB 2567 will mean an official day commemorating homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality in California government schools," said Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families. "This will harm children as young as kindergarten," he said. "Every May 22, AB 2567 will positively portray to children homosexual experimentation, homosexual 'marriages,' sex-change operations, and anything else that's 'in the closet.' Gov. Schwarzenegger should say no to this...

State school pupils are set to be taught Islamic traditions and values in compulsory citizenship lessons. The move - part of a package of initiatives announced by Communities Secretary Hazel Blears yesterday - is designed to curb extremism. Education campaigners warned however against giving Islam a privileged position over other faiths. Other plans announced by Miss Blears also drew criticism - including a state-funded panel of Islamic scholars and theologians to provide community leadership. Prominent Muslims said this scheme was naive because Government endorsement would erode the credibility of those taking part, especially among the young and disaffected. Another measure...

NEW YORK -- A Dutchess County special education teacher has been accused of having sex with a 15-year-old disabled student. Teacher Mandi Weeks, 27, was arrested on Monday in Queens. She admitted to having sex with her student at the Devereux Foundation NY Center for the past month, according to police. Weeks is being charged with two counts of rape with a child under the age of 21 and two acts of acting in a manner to injure a child under the age of 17. The student was in the school’s residential program and lived on campus. He had been...

"If you can't beat 'em, subvert 'em with subterfuge."--RE Bierce With fatal terrorist attacks on the decline worldwide and al Qaeda apparently in disarray, it would seem a time for optimism in the global war on terrorism. But the war has simply shifted to a different arena. Islamists, or those who believe that Islam is a political and religious system that must dominate all others, are focusing less on the military and more on the ideological. --Cinnamon Stillwell, San Francisco Chronicle If you're an Islamist, it's time for Plan B. Islamists aren't dummies: even as al-Qaida is destroyed on the...

LONDON, July 7 (UPI) -- Toddlers who say "yuck" when given flavorful foreign food may be exhibiting racist behavior, a British government-sponsored organization says. The London-based National Children's Bureau released a 366-page guide counseling adults on recognizing racist behavior in young children, The Telegraph reported Monday.

Irate parents said a religious education teacher at the Alsager High School in England told students to wear Muslim headgear during a lesson on Tuesday. "But if Muslims were asked to go to church on Sunday and take Holy Communion, there would be war," the grandfather of one of the students said.

Two schoolboys were given detention after refusing to kneel down and 'pray to Allah' during a religious education lesson. Parents were outraged that the two boys from year seven (11 to 12-year-olds) were punished for not wanting to take part in the practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped. They said forcing their children to take part in the exercise at Alsager High School, near Stoke-on-Trent - which included wearing Muslim headgear - was a breach of their human rights. One parent, Sharon Luinen, said: "This isn't right, it's taking things too far. "I understand that they have to learn...

A brief has been filed in a federal appeals court asking the justices to overturn a judge who ordered a school district specifically to ban the Bible in its policy regarding the distribution of literature to students. WND reported just a week ago when a federal judge declared unconstitutional a Florida law that was used to prevent Gideons from handing out Bibles to students on public property near schools.Now comes another dispute, this one in Missouri and pursued by Liberty Counsel in its request to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. It wants the court to...

Boulder High School students are planning a protest against the Pledge of Allegiance in the courtyard of their school Thursday morning.

American School Books Redefine 'Jihad' to Exclude Violence -- Where is Media? By Warner Todd Huston | June 8, 2008 - 21:49 ET In yet another example of why the west could be too weak to fight the sort of global terrorism that takes the form of Islamofascism, a textbook monitoring group is charging that American textbooks have been cleansed of mentioning the violence inherent in the Islamic "Jihad." Now, our children will not be taught what "Jihad" truly means, nor that it has been used as an excuse to kill their fellow citizens because our schools have sanitized Islam...

Dissatisfied with teaching in Spanish 85 percent of the time, a North Carolina superintendent is pushing for a $10 million budget that includes a plan for a school where only Spanish is spoken. Superintendent Peter Gorman pitched his proposal to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board today, with provisions to turn Collinswood Elementary into a Spanish program. Nora Carr, chief communications officer for Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, told WND the facility will help to preserve Hispanic culture. We find that a lot of kids who go there have parents who might be English-speaking immigrants, and they might be very successful," she said. "They...

Reform Three: Give Parents Real Choice In Education Mr. Norquist makes the case for reform in a few compelling sentences: "America in the third millennium runs its public-school system as a cross between the Soviet Union's steel industry - a monopoly - and Socrates chatting with a handful of students under a tree, which is by definition 2,000-year-old technology. "Ignoring technological change in communications is inexplicably silly. Running something as important as the education of our children through a monopoly bureaucracy that since the 1960s is also subject to labor-union rules is difficult to understand." Even Albert Shanker, the former...

With fatal terrorist attacks on the decline worldwide and al Qaeda apparently in disarray, it would seem a time for optimism in the global war on terrorism. But the war has simply shifted to a different arena. Islamists, or those who believe that Islam is a political and religious system that must dominate all others, are focusing less on the military and more on the ideological. It turns out that Western liberal democracies can be subverted without firing a shot. Nowhere is this more evident than in the educational realm. Islamists have taken what's come to be known as the...

Book Description What's really going at your local public school? In From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth About America's Public Schools, Steven Baldwin and Karen Holgate let parents, concerned teachers and students speak for themselves about the dismal state of government education in America today. The conclusion? Today's schools are laboratories for disaster, where failed methodologies and policies continually find new life thanks to bureaucracies more interested in maintaining power than in educating. Lavishly armed with your tax dollars, government at every level encourages mass social experimentation on our kids - success optional. In From Crayons to Condoms you'll...

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)- When Rock Hill school officials tell commencement crowds to hold their applause until the end, they mean it — police arrested seven people after they were accused of loud cheering during the ceremonies. Six people at Fort Mill High School's graduation were charged Saturday and a seventh at the graduation for York Comprehensive High School was charged Friday with disorderly conduct, authorities said. Police said the seven yelled after students’ names were called. “I just thought they were going to escort me out,� Jonathan Orr told The Herald of Rock Hill, about 70 miles north of Columbia....

A textbook monitoring group said that Maryland middle and high school students will be required to read about Islamic teachings that have been dumbed down and are products of political correctness. According to the New York Examiner, a new report issued by the American Textbook Council said that administrators who approved books for use in the Montgomery County school district caved into pressure by pro-Islamic groups seeking to present a less violent interpretation of Islam. Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, stated that, for example, the definition of jihad has gone through "amazing cultural reorchestration" in textbooks, losing any connotation...

A new report issued by the American Textbook Council says books approved for use in local school districts for teaching middle and high school students about Islam caved in to political correctness and dumbed down the topic at a critical moment in its history. "Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade," wrote Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, who railed against five popular history texts for "adjust[ing] the definition of jihad or sharia or remov[ing] these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths." Sewall complains the word jihad has gone through an "amazing...

Parent wants apology from school district He spends $4,000 fighting citation By JANICE KAYSER jkayser@cninow.com Posted: June 5, 2008 The Wauwatosa father said he took a photo of a reading wall in a Wilson School classroom Feb. 19 to help a parent in his wife's online support group for parents of autistic children. The photo, however, led to an interrogation of another parent, conspiracy accusations and, eight hours later, a disorderly conduct arrest of the puzzled father. "I just cannot believe this happened," Dave Gallenberger said. Gallenberger and his wife, Arlene, and Dana and Barbara Nicholson told a reporter last...

Parents in an area near Houston say they are waiting – for now – to see what a school board will do before taking any other action regarding a public school principal's decision to sponsor a mandatory class for students held by representatives a the Council on American Islamic Relations, an organization that has been linked through its employees to terror allegations. "Every parent and community member who has communicated with us has been deeply concerned about this action and has expressed that changes must be made," said a statement from Pastor Dave Welch, a spokesman for the Houston Area...

Dozens of gangster girls playing hooky from school battled each other in a bloody knife fight on the streets of Brooklyn yesterday afternoon that ended with two teens hospitalized and two more arrested on assault charges, cops said.

A 12-year-old 6th-grader in Hutchinson, Minn., committed to an unusually brave mission for the month of April: he intended to wear T-shirts with a pro-life message to his middle school every day for a month. His courage, however, was met with resistance. According to the boy's attorney, his principal and teachers told him "not to wear the T-shirts, publicly singled him out for ridicule in front of his classmates, removed him from class, sent him to the principal's office, forced him to turn his pro-life T-shirt inside out, and threatened him with suspension if he did not stop wearing the...

A Fourth-grader at Toy Town Elementary School in Winchendon, MA was suspended for five days for showing his friends an empty shell casing to some friends at lunch. According to the NRA-ILA (http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Read.aspx?ID=3975), Bradley Geslak had been given the casing — from a blank fired during Memorial Day — by a US veteren. He was given two, one of which he gave to his grandfather, also a veteren. He was showing his souvenier off to some friends during lunch when a teacher confiscated the casing and called the boy’s mother to take him home. He’s also been told he won’t...

A public school principal in Texas who arranged for an Islamic instruction presentation for students by an organization whose leaders have been linked to terror groups apparently arranged for that indoctrination after being told not to by her district's superintendent, parents have told WND. The issue developed this week when public school students at Friendswood Junior High in the Houston area were herded into an assembly scheduled by Principal Robin Lowe that suddenly replaced a scheduled physical education class, according to reports. There, two women from the Houston division of the Council on American-Islamic Relations instructed students that Adam, Noah...

...On May 29, 2008 the Worcester Telegram & Gazette published a story concerning a ten year boy who was immediately suspended when a school employee found him with a spent blank shell. According to the story entitled "Souvenir Rifle Shell Gets 4th Grader Suspended" the young man was given two of the spent casings by a uniformed veteran after a Memorial Day event. "This is a tragic example of how far over the edge this state and our schools have gone. For the school officials to react in such a manner is simply inexcusable," said Jim Wallace Executive Director of...

Public school students at Friendswood Junior High in the Houston area have been roped into Islamic training by representatives from the Council on American-Islamic Relations during class time, prompting religious leaders to protest over Principal Robin Lowe's actions. Pastor Dave Welch, spokesman for the Houston Area Pastor Council, confirmed the indoctrination had taken place and called it "unacceptable." "The failure of the principal of Friendswood Junior High to respect simple procedures requiring parental notification for such a potentially controversial subject, to not only approve but participate personally in a religious indoctrination session led by representatives of a group with well-known...

PORT ST. LUCIE — Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son's kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class. After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn't like about Barton's 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Barton said. By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism — out of the class. Melissa Barton filed a complaint with Morningside's school resource officer, who investigated the matter, Port St....

(Wichita) Four Hispanic families are suing St. Anne's Catholic School over a policy that requires students to speak English at all times while at school. The lawsuit, filed Monday, calls for an end to this policy and asks for an order barring similar policies at other diocese schools. And it asks for court costs and unspecified damages for diiscrimination and emotional suffering. The lawsuit was filed by Mike and Clara Silva, Maria and Fermin Fernandez, Guadalupe Cruz-Tello and Alma Contreras on behalf of themselves and their minor children. The diocese said the school enacted the policy in response to four...

In 2006, I wrote about Fordson High School a/k/a "Hezbollah High." The Dearborn high school is the first majority Muslim public high school in America. And it foreshadows what's to come in America's future as we allow more and more Muslims to immigrate here and refuse to absorb into America.

Postville, Iowa - Late Tuesday afternoon, Postville schools Superintendent Dave Strudthoff was angry. Not at the immigration authorities, or Agriprocessors or undocumented workers, but at the U.S. Congress. He considers lawmakers' "lack of courage" a personal affront, for their failure to pass a bill that would give children of illegal immigrants a chance to earn citizenship. One of the top five students at Postville, set to graduate at the end of the term, is Mexican. He's been in school at Postville since third grade. "The day he graduates, with honors, he will go underground," Strudthoff said, declining to give the...

- Snip -But what if that curriculum is really a disguise for a very different agenda brought to Minneapolis by the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based gay and transgender advocacy group? What if its lessons have little to do with bullying, and much to do with ensuring that kids as young as age 5 submit to HRC's orthodoxy on family structure, even if it differs from their own parents' view? - Snip - In March, Minneapolis Superintendent Bill Green praised "Welcoming Schools" as "a tool to combat bullying, by focusing on diversity, gender stereotyping and name-calling." But the curriculum's...

A Pennsylvania elementary school has angered parents by giving them one-day's notice of planned counseling sessions with 100 third-grade students to explain that one of their male classmates would soon begin wearing girls' clothing and taking a female name and to ask that they accept him as a girl and not make unkind remarks. The exercise in "social transition" was initiated by the boy's parents who approached the administration at Chatham Park Elementary School in Haverford Township asking that the school help in having their child's female identity find acceptance among his peers. After consulting experts on transgender children, the...

History textbooks being used by hundreds of thousands of public school students across the U.S. are blatantly promoting Islam, according to a new report by an independent organization that researches and reviews textbooks. WND has reported several times on issues involving the promotion of Islam in public school texts, including a recent situation in which California parents complained their children were being taught that "jihad" to Muslims means "doing good works. The new report is from the American Textbook Council, which was established in 1989 as an independent national research organization to review social studies textbooks and advance the quality...

A state-funded organization in Maine that has been touted as "a stellar program for social change" is advertising a coming seminar that essentially provides information to impressionable school-age boys on how to be homosexual, according to a pro-family organization opposing the plans. The seminar is called "Queer, Questioning, Quiet: Developing Gender Identity & Male Sexual Orientation" and is being promoted by the Boys to Men organization headquartered in Portland, Maine, during its coming 2008 conference. The session is to feature a presentation by speakers from the homosexual Proud Rainbow Youth for Southern Maine, officials said. "I think it's outrageous," Michael...

A seventh-grader organizes a protest outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Washington. A 15-year-old girl attempts to ban circus elephants in Denver. A rash of adolescent-driven, animal-rights-related vandalism hits California. A popular software company promotes a video game about "animal liberation" activists who destroy medical research labs, and in a new game “Clubby the Seal” takes revenge by collecting human skin hides. Is there any doubt that the animal rights movement is targeting your kids? In a newly updated report, "Your Kids, PETA's Pawns," the Center for Consumer Freedom explores how one group, the $31 million People for the Ethical...

Benson, N.C. — A teacher at West Johnston High School has been suspended following allegations that she exposed herself to students. Johnston County Schools spokeswoman Crystal Roberts declined to identify the teacher but said the school system is investigating the claim and taking it seriously.

The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the U.S. An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of...

Would this not send a strong message to support Christianity? Would it not also be a counter to the homosexual “Day of Silence?” Any comments?

Students at the Mount Vernon, Ohio, school district have called a 'take-your-Bible-to-school day" tomorrow in support of a popular teacher who has been ordered to keep his Bible hidden while students are in his classroom. Coach Dave Daubenmire of Pass The Salt Ministries and Minutemen United, who is acting as a spokesman for teacher John Freshwater, told WND the campaign has been organized by students using cell phones, text messaging and e-mails. WND reported just one day earlier when the dispute arose, with orders from school officials for Freshwater to hide his Bible from students and Freshwater's decision to not...

court in Wisconsin has been asked to suspend immediately a policy in the Tomah Area School District that bans Christian symbols in students' artwork, but allows Hindu, Buddhist and satanic representations. The motion was filed yesterday by the Alliance Defense Fund, which has taken on the case of a student identified by the initials A.P. The ADF launched a lawsuit on the student's behalf after a teacher refused to give him a grade on a project because his work included "John 3:16" as well as "As sign of love." The school district, however, openly acknowledged and publicized various pieces of...

REASON No. 100 to keep your kid out of public school: Desperate to save programs for gifted students, the Department of Education has decided to dumb down standards for getting into smart classes. Now, kids entering the realm of the gifted and talented don't have to score in the top 5 percent on an entrance exam - the top 10 will do. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said he's been forced into this bone-headed move because there aren't enough brilliant kids left to keep these programs running. And to this, I have to laugh.

Guilty at 6 By MARK STEYN | April 14, 2008 Is American public education a form of child abuse? A week ago, The Washington Post's Brigid Schulte reported on a student named Randy Castro who attends school in Woodbridge, Virginia. Last November at recess he slapped a classmate on her bottom. The teacher took him to the principal. School officials wrote up an incident report and then called the police. Randy Castro is in the First Grade. But, at the ripe old age of six, he's been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He's guilty of sexual...

Did you catch the video this week of a student kicking the stuffing out of an art teacher in Baltimore, Maryland while the rest of the class cheered the pounding on? Y’know, if that teacher was moi, and some F-bomb dropping Darwinian throwback came over my desk to accost me, I’d grab my handy dandy scissors and plant ‘em in the feral teen’s skullcap, Jason Voorhees style. From there I would proceed to snag the American flag from the corner of the room (if there was one) in order to stave off the rest of the flesh eating zombies ‘til...

Someone in Minnesota needs to check into this.