Free Republic

A Texas mother is speaking out after her daughter's school gave the young girl a henna tattoo the week before Christmas. Tammy Samour was shocked when she picked up her daughter Leah, 7, from Ed White Elementary School in Houston and saw the second grader's hands covered in the designs, which are traditionally applied to the hands and feet of women during Hindu ceremonies and festivals. That shock soon turned to outrage however as Ms. Samour says she never gave the school permission to tattoo Leah - and now the brown paste will not wash off her hands. It can...

Were you aware that Christian parents are in the grip of fear over Islamic indoctrination in public schools? Neither was I, and I live at ground zero of a raging controversy over the manner in which public schools teach Islam, Christianity, and other world religions. My home county, Maury County, Tenn., made headlines when parents objected to an assignment, to middle-school kids, to write the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith. Other parents objected to apparent bias in the curriculum, noting that instruction about Christianity was both delayed and skewed, with an emphasis on Christians persecuting other Christians and...

CBS NEWS December 18, 2015 School Cancels Santa Field Trip After Mom Objects SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Parents of San Jose school kids confronted a school board Thursday night after a decision to cancel a field trip to see Santa Claus followed a complaint by a Jewish mother who objected to the school-sponsored outing, CBS San Francisco station KPIX-TV reports. The visit to Santa, along with a "Dear Santa" assignment, was a decade-long tradition at Sartorette Elementary School, part of San Jose's Cambrian School District. Last week, the Sartorette staff informed parents the school would suspend the outing to see...

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 17, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Not enough teenagers are being taught about condoms, artificial birth control, and other "skills" "needed to avoid HIV, other STDs, and unintended pregnancy," says a new government report. Every other year, the CDC surveys the nation's high schools and middle schools. Last Wednesday, it released the results of the 2014 School Health Profiles Survey at the National HIV Prevention Conference. The results covered a wide variety of health behaviors, including a section on sexual education. The sexual education results were unsatisfactory, said a press release, which noted that "fewer than half of high...

A Kentucky school district is being urged to reconsider after censoring "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and other programs by removing all references to religion. The Alliance Defending Freedom weighed in Tuesday after Johnson County Schools officials agreed to modify its holiday programming in order to avoid a potential lawsuit, a move prompted by a complaint from a parent about the classic Peanuts play.

Have you ever wondered what it's like to wear a Islamic hijab, which is mandated by Islamic law? Is that what you want for your daughters? Have you ever wondered what it feels like as a woman to wear a hijab? The terror connected Muslim Student Association recently held an event at a high school in Chicago where they encouraged non-Muslim girls to wear traditional hijabs (bolding is mine). The "Walk a Mile in Her Hijab" event Wednesday, hosted by the 10-member organization, was designed to allow non-Muslim female students the opportunity to wear the head covering and gain a...

Charlie Brown: I guess I don't really know what Christmas is about. Isn't there anyone who understands what Christmas is all about? Linus: Sure, I can tell you what Christmas is all about. -- "A Charlie Brown Christmas" In the Peanuts Christmas (not "holiday") classic, a morose Charlie Brown struggles to come to grips with "the true meaning of Christmas." Recall that Lucy, dispensing psychiatric advice as a cure for Charlie Brown's melancholy, therapeutically tasks him with directing their school's Christmas play. "You need involvement," she tells him. "You need to get involved in some real Christmas project." When...

Santa Claus is banned. The Pledge of Allegiance is no longer recited. "Harvest festival" has replaced Thanksgiving, and "winter celebrations" substitute for Christmas parties. New principal Eujin Jaela Kim has given PS 169 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a politically correct scrub-down, to the dismay of teachers and parents. "We definitely can't say Christmas, nothing with Christmas on it, nothing with Santa,"PTA president Mimi Ferrer said administrators told her. "No angels. We can't even have a star because it can represent a religious system, like the Star of David." Kim, 33, did not return a call or e-mail seeking comment.

Youssif Zaghwani Omar, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, was arrested on suspicion of child abuse this past week for “allegedly grabbing a 14-year-old female relative by the hair and dragging her into a car after he noticed she wasn’t wearing a hijab.” Omar was at a local high school when he saw the girl without the Muslim headscarf. The Daily Mail reports: Officer Latisha Stroer told the Columbia Tribune in an email that Omar grabbed the girl ‘very violently by the hair’. He then allegedly slapped her across the face, and pulled her by the hair down...

You may not believe who is abusing America’s immigration laws to secure cheap labor — public schools. "The foreign teacher trafficking business has stretched from the Prince George's County, Maryland, school district (which was ordered to pay $5.9 million in back wages and penalties for H-1B abuses in 2011) to the East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, school system (which required H-1B teachers to pay a $50 interview fee, $5,000 job application fee, and a $7,500 additional fee to a recruitment agency) and beyond," Michelle Malkin and John Miano write in their new book, Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires and Bipartisan Beltway...

UMass-Amherst students are protesting their school's seal, claiming it promotes racism and violence, because it depicts a Native American holding a bow and an arrow. While the seal does depict an arm holding a sword, protesters have taken issue with the Native American man centered in the logo. The Indian can be seen standing in the center: "We do live in occupied, colonized land," said student organizer Charlotte Kelly, who called the logo "offensive." She continued, "This land had been a part of indigenous communities before it became the University of Massachusetts. And for us to be capitalizing and using...

As far as I can tell, “Black Lives Matter” has shown zero anger or protest toward black student who posted “I’m going to shoot every black person I can on campus. Starting tomorrow morning.” Over at Saginaw Valley State University, a 21 year old black student named Emmanuel D. Bowden posted the following message online:“I’m going to shoot every black person I can on campus. Starting tomorrow morning.”He could receive 20 years in prison for this.It’s been six days since this information has been reported by the media, and yet, as far as I have been able to tell, the “Black...

At Triton Regional High School in Rowley, it’s 1984 — the novel, not the year. The sniveling PC school 
administration is backing off now, but the 32-page questionnaire they were asking their middle and high school students to fill out last week is chilling. It’s downright totalitarian, and it’s put out by the Harvard School of Education, but I repeat myself. The kids from the high and middle schools (the questionnaire included a box for 10-year-olds to check) were asked by the apparatchiks from the People’s Republic of Cambridge to rat out their parents for insufficient 
Political Correctness. George Orwell’s...

Amid heightened fears over terrorism, an Orange County teacher has found herself in trouble after ordering her class to sing a song about Islam. The teacher says she was trying to teach her seventh-grade class about the religion of Islam by using a catchy tune. Using the melody of the song “This Is My Fight Song,” the teacher applied custom lyrics, such as: “Like a sandstorm in the desert, sending camels into motion, like how a single faith can make a heart open, they might only have one god, but they can make an explosion.” The song was then presented...

The United States Department of Education has given Palatine, Illinois School District 30 days to reach a “solution” that allows a “transgendered” boy who says he is a girl to shower with the girls. Failure to comply could result in the loss of federal Title IX funds.The young man in question “identifies” as a girl. The school district has allowed him to play on the girls’ sports team. He is called “she” by school staff who refer to him by a female name. He says his “rights” are being violated because the school district asks him to change clothes behind...

A recent, widely publicized incident in which a policeman was called to a school classroom to deal with a disruptive student has provoked all sorts of comments on whether the policeman used "excessive force." What has received far less attention, though it is a far larger question, with more sweeping implications, is the role of disruptive students in schools. Critics of charter schools have often pointed to those schools' ability to expel uncooperative and disruptive students, far more readily than regular public schools can, as a reason for some charter schools' far better educational outcomes, as shown on many tests....

On Wednesday, the federal government declared itself fit for the madhouse by mandating that a Chicago high school allow a full biological male into the girls’ locker room for all purposes, including nudity. This biological male, the feds determined, was different because he thinks he is a female.

Two disturbing cases highlight the serious problems with the nation’s immigration laws under the Obama administration; In one, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused a local police department of racial profiling for arresting two previously deported illegal immigrants and turning them over to federal authorities for removal. In the other, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged a public school district with discrimination for verifying the immigration status of its employees. The first case comes out of New Llano, a Louisiana town of about 2,500 near the Texas border. In the course of doing their job, a pair of police...

It's a not-so rosy report card for the nation's schoolchildren. Math scores slipped for fourth and eighth graders over the last two years, and reading grades were not much better, flat for fourth graders and lower for eighth graders, according to the 2015 Nation's Report Card. ... Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged parents, teachers, and others not to panic about the scores as states embrace higher academic standards, such as Common Core.

A new trend in math at elementary schools around the country has parents pulling out their hair. Mainly because it is the opposite of how most of today's adults were taught to do simple multiplication in the first place. According to a Common Core math worksheet that's gone viral, an elementary child today cannot just say, "5 x 3 = 15." Instead they have to change the multiplication problem to addition before solving the equation. However, if the child says, "5 + 5 + 5 = 15," they will still lose points because the problem must be written as it...