Free Republic

Plenty of state school systems are struggling with ways to not only keep up with national mandates and restrictions, but to boost their graduation rates so they can maintain their funding and reduce criticism from the public. California seems to have come up a rather unique, back door approach to the problem. You could always take tens of thousands of former high school students who flunked out and simply give them a diploma anyway. (Daily Caller) The state of California is poised to award thousands of high school degrees to dropouts by passing a new law retroactively removing the...

HADLEY, Mass. - Lawyers for three teenage girls accused of participating in the bullying of a 15-year-old girl who committed suicide entered not guilty pleas Thursday on their behalf to charges including civil rights violations and criminal harassment. Ashley Longe, Sharon Chanon Velazquez and Flannery Mullins, all 16, did not appear in Franklin-Hampshire Juvenile Court for their arraignments. A judge ordered them to have no contact with the family of Phoebe Prince, a South Hadley High School freshman who hanged herself in January after what prosecutors called an "unrelenting" three-month bullying campaign by six teenagers. Prosecutors say Prince was targeted...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A school in New York's Greenwich Village will reopen in September as America's first publicly run high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students, officials said on Monday. Although The Harvey Milk School has been operating with two classrooms for 20 years, $3.2 million is being spent by the City to expand it to take 100 students. Named after a gay San Francisco politician assassinated in 1978, the school will be funded jointly by the city education department and a gay rights youth advocacy group. "Everybody feels that it's a good idea because some of...

<p>The city is opening a full-fledged high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students - the first of its kind in the nation, The Post has learned.</p> <p>Operating for two decades as a small alternative program with just two classrooms, the new Harvey Milk HS officially opens as a stand-alone public school with 100 students in September.</p>

A New York teen-ager has alleged teachers violated her civil rights when they suspended her from school for wearing a "Barbie is a Lesbian" T-shirt. Lawyers who filed a lawsuit on her behalf in Manhattan federal court on Thursday said 14-year-old Natalie Young is openly lesbian and that a teacher laughed at her, calling the garment and its reference to the popular Barbie doll "inappropriate." Young alleged that the principal held her for three hours in an office at the school in the borough of Queens on April 10, 2002 and refused to allow her to return to class while...