Free Republic

When a family in Lenoir (Caldwell County) decided to withdraw their son from public school last month in order to teach him at home, an official at the middle school refused to remove him from the public school rolls until the mother first produced a “home school license.” This meant that the child would be considered truant by the public school while being taught in a homeschool setting. After the parents contacted Home School Legal Defense Association for assistance, Senior Counsel Dewitt Black wrote the school official and advised her that the family was in full compliance with state law,...

Calif. teacher fired for setting up porn sites on work laptop Heidi Kaeslin, 37, was let go from Lincoln High School in Stockton last year for setting up sleazy websites, including mysluttyteacher.com. A California high school teacher has been fired for setting up porn sites — including one called mysluttyteacher.com — on her work laptop. Heidi Kaeslin, 37, was dismissed from Lincoln High School in Stockton last year after her involvement in the seedy project came to light. This week, a panel from the state Office of Administrative Hearings confirmed the ruling — saying files found on the PC were...

Butter-Knife-Wielding Girl Stopped by School Officials; Pears Shaken but Unharmed Posted 16 hours ago by Tad Cronn Filed under 2nd Amendment, Crime, Education, Gun Control, Socialism You can’t make this stuff up. A 13-year-old girl was suspended for one day from Wamsutta Middle School in Massachussetts because she brought a butter knife to school. She needed the knife to cut the pear packed in her lunch because she wears braces that prevent her from simply biting into the fruit. Morgan LaPlaume told WXFT-TV that the principal spotted the deadly weapon on the lunch table and hauled her miscreant behind into...

Just wanted to report that today I saw kids praying in public school. About eight of them. High school age boys! I attended a music competition to see my daughter's high school band perform. As the group waited outside to go into the warm-up room, prior to performing for the judges, a boy said, "Well, guys, we should pray." There was a little back and forth as it was sorted out who was Christian and who was not interested, and a huddle of guys formed, with their arms around each others' shoulders, seriously praying for their performance to go well...

CORPUS CHRISTI -- Many parents check their children's school work to make sure they're getting good grades, but how often to you check the content of those lessons? One mother of a child in Flour Bluff ISD says when she did, she was shocked that lesson taught her son to blame the United States for the 9/11 attacks. Kara Sands posted the test on her facebook page and it began to spread like wildfire. The test covers content watched on a video in class. What bothered her most is question #3 on the test. It asks why the U.S. may...

A bully tossed a disabled girl out of the back door of a moving school bus and straight into the path of oncoming traffic — an attack that easily could have ended in death. Two matrons were on the bus dealing with a ruckus, but neither was able to protect Amore-Virginia Peterson, 13, on Friday. She said that when she slammed into the pavement she thought she “was going to die” — but she managed to scramble out of the road before she was hit by the cars bearing down on her. The bipolar sixth-grader suffered a broken collarbone and...

It is an old saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but a record 18.7 million American schoolchildren would not have learned that lesson when they attended school in fiscal year 2012. That is because U.S. taxpayers—via the U.S. Department of Agriculture—were picking up the tab for their lunch. According to new data from the USDA, during the average school month in fiscal year 2012, 18.7 million students in U.S. high schools and grammar schools were given completely free lunches, courtesy of the department’s National School Lunch Program. That was up from the record of 18.4...

While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families. Say goodbye to your children's privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It's yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of "Common Core." As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core's technological project is "merely...

Summer Schreiner of Cocoa, Florida attended the Silver Ring Thing Conference, a Christian event that promotes abstinence only. At the conference, she obtained a t-shirt that read: “Don’t drink and park… accidents cause kids” Summer believed in what the shirt said and was proud to wear it to school the next day. Everything was going well for her at Clearlake Middle School until just after lunch. On her way back to class, the 8th grader was stopped by the vice principal who told her to go to the office and change her shirt because it was inappropriate. She was given...

Hi Freepers, Just wanted some feedback on this non-profit which is going to bring true school choice to every child in the land. The following is our declaration. Let me know what you think. And please spread the word if you agree. thanks jc This is the first edition of End the Education Plantation’s newsletter, The Liberator. In the months ahead, we’ll use it to offer up news and opinions about school choice. We take our name from William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper. Garrison fought against the evils of physical slavery; we fight against the evils of educational slavery. In...

For a country that is undergoing huge economic , social and demographic changes, education needs a more resolute direction. Nationally, private school enrolment in rural India is increasing at about 10% every year. In the next five years, India may have half of the children attending private schools even in rural areas. According to the Annual Status of Education Report, ASER 2012, released recently in the Capital, the enrolment level for the 6-14 age group continue to be high in rural areas. In 2012, 96.5% of all the children in this age group in rural areas were enrolled in schools....

The easiest way to understand the field of education is to consider a legal concept, bad faith. It’s been around for thousands of years; in Latin, the phrase was mala fides. Any time there’s a split between what is claimed and what is fact, you’ve got bad faith. If I come to your house with a sincere intention to paint it professionally, I am acting in good faith. I may be negligent and spill paint on your Lexus; but I have not acted in bad faith. Suppose I come to your house with a scrapbook of photographs showing houses I...

Scott Compton, a South Carolina high school teacher, is facing possible dismissal by his school board for stomping on an American flag in three of his classes last month. Compton, who teaches honors English at Chapin High School, has been with the school for seven years, but the tenure of his job is now in question as the Lexington-Richland 5 school board will decide whether or not to dismiss the teacher for his actions. ... "He drew a couple of symbols, like one of them was a cross, and he said, 'What does this represent?' and everybody said, 'Christianity,'" said...

In the 70 percent of Texas public schools where a private curriculum has been installed, students are learning the “fact” that “Allah is the Almighty God,” charge critics of a new online curriculum that already is facing condemnation for its secrecy and restrictions on oversight. The program, called CSCOPE, is a private venture operating under the umbrella of the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, whose incorporation documents state its independence from the State Board of Education of the Texas Education Agency. Other reports previously have raised alarm over the curriculum’s depiction of the Boston Tea Party as a terrorist...

I’m pretty critical of Senator John Hoeven at times, but he deserves credit for going to bat against federal overreach on school lunches. New federal guidelines that, among others things, limited calories in school lunches rankled parents and school administrators across the nation. It was a one-size-fits-all policy for a nation full of students who have very different nutritional needs.Now, thanks to the work of Senator Hoeven (who teamed up with Arkansas Democrat Mark Pryor), the calorie restriction is no more, though just for the 2012-2013 school year. So it’s a temporary reprieve, for now. From a press release sent...

[Video] FreedomProject Education: The Online Homeschool Revolution === FreedomProject Education FreedomProject Education examines the end result it hopes to achieve in its education of today's youth and tomorrow's leaders. - Learn More: http://www.fpeusa.org/ History: FreedomProject Education is a K-12 virtual education institution, founded by the American Opinion Foundation. Established in 2005, American Opinion Foundation, Inc. performs charitable, scientific, literary and/or educational services through community outreach activities. In keeping with AOF charter, FreedomProject began as an extensive free online resource for Americanist education in the classical style, based on the principles and core values modeled in the era of America's founding....

With all of the problems going on in the world, this is trivial, hence the vanity post. But an example of what's going on in our schools and who thinks they control our kids. My niece signed up for what should have been a simple, easy "A" grade HS class. Purely an elective, having nothing to do with requirements or career. Turns out the teacher is a real piece of work. He's intimidating and creepy. (My nieces words.) I asked if anything had happened to make her feel "creepy" and she just said she doesn't like the feeling she gets...

WEST HARTFORD —— The beef is there, but where's the pickle? That's the question students at Hall High School have been asking on hamburger day in the cafeteria since the food services department made menu changes to meet new school lunch rules from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Students are "outraged over the removal of pickles and salt from the cafeteria at Hall to meet nutrition guidelines," student representative Kendall Teare told the school board last week.

House Republicans say new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines aimed at forcing students to eat fruits and vegetables are a failure because students across the country are simply tossing the healthy fare into the trash. "[T]here remains great concern with the amount of food waste generated at school cafeterias, much of it brought on by requiring students to take fruits and vegetables rather than simply offer them," Reps. John Kline (R-Minn.), Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) and Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) told USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack in a letter sent Thursday. "This is a waste of federal, state and local funds and...

Kindergartener Receives 10-Day Suspension for NERF Gun There’s nothing more innocuous than a NERF (Non-Expanding Recreational Foam) gun – right? Well, not if you’re an administrator at Duchesne Elementary School of Ferguson/Florissant School District in Missouri. Apparently, a toy gun that shoots foam-based projectiles presents a clear and present danger to students, faculty and staff. To clarify, on Monday, school officials meted out a 10-day suspension to a five-year-old who brought his NERF gun to class. That’s correct. 10 days for a NERF gun. The principal of the School, Katie Sanders sent a letter home to the parents explaining the...