Free Republic

SNIPPET: "As always, the safety of all of our students is of primary concern to us and we will continue to review safety and crisis plans on a frequent basis."

A teenager has become the first ever openly gay head boy to be given the role at one of the country’s elite group of public schools. Will Emery, 17, who came out to his family three years ago, was voted in by more than 1,000 pupils and staff at Brighton College in Sussex, one of the most successful schools of its type in Britain, with boarding fees starting at £27,000 ($42,110) a year. … Mr. Emery has used his new position to speak critically of schools that use policies that stop teachers from discussing homosexuality. …

"I think you should check out the APEX program," my high school counselor Mrs. Workman suggested. APEX stood for Area Program Enrichment Exchange, and involved several L.A. area high schools, including Fairfax High. Intended for "advanced" students, the program allowed them to take courses not offered at their home school. In my case, I had exhausted all of the Spanish courses at Crenshaw High, the predominately black inner-city school I attended. But Fairfax, predominately Jewish, had higher-level courses and would accept me. "It'll be a way for you to continue your Spanish -- where, I see from your transcript, you...

According to the official White House website, the end goal of schooling is to “help restore middle-class security.” Such a stance is a surprisingly honest one in a political environment built on deceit. The Obama administration makes no attempt to hide the fact that mandatory public schooling is a state tool for manipulating class structure. This is both a historical and economic fact. Modern American schooling stems from two sources. First the Prussian school system which was used by the Nazis to limit and control legal access to information while psychologically training students in order to promote fascist ideology. The...

For many Americans, privacy has become a hot topic of discussion. As story after story rolls out about the NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, and any other overreaching government organization abusing its power, Americans find themselves asking the hard questions and not liking the answers that fly back and smack them in the face. The Fourth Amendment reads as follows: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing...

At first blush, it seems crazy. The perpetually destitute Los Angeles Unified School District will spend $30 million to purchase thousands of iPad tablets to give away to students at 47 LAUSD campuses. At second blush, it seems crazier. This purchase all but commits the nation's second largest school district to hundreds of million of dollars of additional spending with Apple over the next two years. That's right, two years, hundreds of millions. At third blush, it seems like a rip-off. The LAUSD will pay $678 per iPad, even though you can belly up to the Genius Bar at the...

The logic works like this: If homosexual acts are moral, as so many now insist, then they should be normative. If they are normative, they should be taught in our schools as a standard. If they are a standard, they should be enforced. And so it has come, and is coming, to be. Education is an essential part of the drive to universalize the rationalization for homosexual behavior; so it must become a mandatory part of the curriculum. What began as a plea for diversity ends with a demand for conformity.The infiltration of higher education by LGBT studies is well known....

14-Year-Old Refuses To Remove NRA T-Shirt, Faces 1 Year In Jail AUTHOR Kristin Tate A middle school student in West Virginia was suspended after he refused to remove the NRA t-shirt he was wearing. 14-year-old Jared Marcum is charged with obstruction of an officer. Prosecutors have moved forward in actively pursuing the charge — the middle schooler could face up to a year and jail and a $500 fine if found guilty.

Father Gabriele Amorth is an old school priest. The octogenarian told The London Times this week that, since he was ordained way back in 1954, he has cast out some 160,000 demons. I believe that gives Father Gabriele some authority on the devil. So when he told the Times, “Practicing yoga brings evil,” he got my attention. I’ve long considered yoga a benign form of exercise, no more harmful than, say, aerobics or Pilates or, the apparent latest craze, Zumba. But after doing some research, I’m inclined to agree with Father Gabriele, the exorcist. While yoga indeed has a physical...

MILWAUKEE – Deidri Hernandez’s seven-year-old son won’t be in school tomorrow, after officials at Tippecanoe School for the Arts and Humanities confirmed they’re still holding “Switch It Up Day” – a time for students to come dressed as members of the opposite sex. Hernandez tells EAGnews the day was originally billed as “Gender Bender Day,” but Tippecanoe officials made the name change after she called Principal Jeffrey Krupar to complain. The Milwaukee mother was not impressed. “I didn’t have a problem with the title. I had a problem with the activity taking place,” Hernandez says. She says it’s “ridiculous” and...

Parents of children attending a Red Hook, New York, middle school are outraged after a recent anti-bullying presentation at Linden Avenue Middle School. The workshop for 13 and 14-year-old girls focused on homosexuality and gender identity. They were also taught words such as "pansexual" and "genderqueer." Parents say their daughters were told to ask one another for a kiss and they say two girls were told to stand in front of the class and pretend they were lesbians on a date.

Barack Obama held a campaign stop at Manor Technical High School in Austin, Texas today. He used the high school kids as props for his speech. Obama also told the high schoolers that he will need their help to push his agenda. “Every once in a while I’m going to need your help to lean on your elected representatives…” (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Here’s the transcript via the White House website: Now, there are three things that we’ve got to focus on to create more jobs and opportunity for the middle class. First of all, we’ve got to make America a magnet for...

“Our teachers haven’t had a raise for the last three years.” — Ed Hughes, clerk and candidate for president of the Madison School Board There are a lot of employees who haven’t seen their pay go up in three years, but the vast majority of Madison public school teachers aren’t among them. And yet, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re taking home more money. Confused? Welcome to the world of public school teacher compensation, post-Act 10. Hughes isn’t the first public school representative whose definition of “raise” doesn’t jibe with the way the rest of the world defines “raise” — i.e.,...

NEW YORKA New York City public elementary school has adopted an all-vegetarian menu, serving kids tofu wraps and veggie chili. Public School 244 is the first public school in the city to go all-veggie. The animal-welfare group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals says it might be the first all-veggie public elementary school in the nation. Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott says he's proud of the "trailblazing" school. He ate the new food with children on Tuesday.

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...