Posted on 11/15/2008 7:32:55 PM PST by george76
About half the students chose to participate, according to Martin.
Tedesco, 55, a retired U.S. Marine Corps major, and others who signed his petitions didn't like that solution
Geez, some people are never satisfied. I guess that since the Marines don't put up with whining, he had years of it backlogged and it's all spilling out now.
A pair of Socialists, as I recall.
I didn’t know it was that high.
I am a parent of a 1st grader at Woodbury School. The pledge is NOT banned from the classroom! The way our students say the pledge right now is a wonderful sight to behold.
At 7:55 AM 95% of the 50+ students (k-6) join together as a community. A sixth grader is honored by reading the day’s announcements to the assembled group and then leads the entire school in saying the Pledge. I counted only 7 children on Monday that did not partake in saying the pledge, some of those kids are Jehovahs and some are abstaining, this is as it should be in our great nation.
For the last ten years, our school only said the pledge once a week, at the school-wide assembly on Wednesdays. Late last school year, the pledge was accidentally left out of that meeting, no one can say exactly when, but it was NOT intentional. At the start of this year, one parent wanted to make sure it was not forgotten, but he did not follow established procedure. He had a brief phone call with the principal and she made sure it was said at the weekly meeting. But this one parent decided he was not satisfied, so instead of going through the proper channels, he jumped right to the last step and created a petition calling for the pledge to be said 5 days a week.
Out of 600+ registered voters and 800+ residents in the town he collected 310 signatures, a respectable amount. After he submitted his petition to the school, the staff and the board decided to honor his request. At first, they extended the existing procedure, to assemble all the students in the Auditorium/Cafeteria on the top floor, just like they do for the Wednesday meeting. After a week of this it was realized that this was impractical and the school staff changed the procedure to assemble the students just outside their classrooms in the foyer. The staff’s primary thought was to keep the students together as a whole community, NOT to ‘ban them from the classroom’!
At least 20 of the other parents that I have talked to that DID sign the petition are satisfied with this communal recitation led by an older student. It recalls to use our old one-room school houses where the older students helped teach the young ones. The sixth grader’s, incidentally, also have a ceremony to take down the exterior flag at the end of the school day and they properly carry the flag into their classroom to fold it correctly.
This is all as it should be.
But this one parent that started the petition refuses to stop, even though he told me directly that he personally would be happy with only one day a week! He is still out there, trying to split our students and teachers and parents apart.
Last Friday he led an angry group of Woodbury residents (only ONE had a student at the school) inside the school and they started shouting about how the students gathering together and being led by a sixth grader was a ‘disgrace’ and how the principal was disrespecting the pledge! When they were asked to leave for being disruptive, they initially refused. Only after the principal insisted did they go outside. They stayed right outside the front door and harassed the School Board chair for 45 minutes! And the school board chair is a Christian home-school advocate that supports saying the pledge!
Students inside the school actually asked their teachers if they and the principal were safe from the angry mob right outside their window! The school staff and students are TERRIFIED of this man now.
Yesterday Fox News ran a story full of lies claiming that we have ‘banned the pledge’ and ‘banned God’ from our classrooms. They KNOW it’s false, one of the parents quoted in the AP article last Friday very clearly informed the Fox producer who called her exactly what is the real situation here. Just this morning Fox had a segment on our school and had the petitioner and one of the signers on live, nationwide. Yet the host wouldn’t let the other guy get his point across, which is this: He signed the petition asking for the pledge to be said 5 days a week, and now it is and he’s happy with it. The Fox host (I think it was Doocey) interrupted him and wouldn’t let him finish his thought!
Starting last Friday, our school and some parents and school board members have been getting phone calls from crazy people all over America calling us Communists, saying we should all be rounded up and deported. Our school secretary has been cussed out over the phone several times a day from Conservatives screaming at her, calling her names and such. That has got to stop!
This is a NON ISSUE, folks! There is NO policy to prevent students from saying the pledge inside the classrooms! We, The People, WANT our kids saying it together as a group.
are we now allowed to post AP articles on the FR??
yes
only short excerpts
Mine went to a private school and a private religious college, and both required community service as part of the ethic of the schools. To me, that's the only type of requirement that should be made. When gubmint starts to do it, it's coercion and it violates freedom of conscience that should belong to families and religious groups.
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