Free Republic

Students at the nation’s second largest school district will be shielded from prosecution and sent to administrators for low-level offenses as part of a sweeping reform to the way school police respond to bad behavior. Zoe Rawson of the Community Rights Campaign says students caught fighting or possessing alcohol or marijuana will receive interventions by a guidance counselor or school administrator, a shift that will prevent students, especially minorities, from becoming mired in the criminal justice system. …

NEW YORK, NY- When is spanking a crime? A New York court just ruled in favor of a Long Island Dad who hit his 8-year-old son for cursing. The court found that spanking was a reasonable use of force. And other states are okaying it too. Spanking is at the center of the New York state court case. The state appellate court dismissed neglect charges against a Long Island father who spanked his 8-year old son for cursing at an adult, saying spanking did not constitute excessive punishment. Criminal defense lawyer Arthur Aidala says the judge says as long as...

Nine out of 10 parents admit that spanking their children is sometimes appropriate. This week, a New York court ruled in favor of a father charged with child abuse, saying that it was a “reasonable use of force.” On Fox and Friends this morning, psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow said it’s “never a good idea” to spank kids. “The bottom line is it’s always the end of the discussion—hitting your kids. It’s never the beginning of a discussion. It teaches them nothing,” he said.

Another little boy has gotten in trouble at school for having something that represents a gun but isn’t actually anything like a real gun. This time, eight-year-old Asher Palmer rolled up a piece of paper, called it a gun and pointed it at other kids, reports the New York Post. Officials at the special-needs school in New York City which Palmer attended then expelled him. The school is the Lang School, a ritzy private bastion which specializes in educating students with language difficulties. Annual tuition is $51,500. “Asher is exactly the type of student Lang is supposed to be serving,”...

The late Michael Hastings wrote the definitive magazine profile of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for Rolling Stone in June 2012. Now that America's Last Prisoner of War has been released, in a prisoner exchange for five high-ranking Taliban officials, Hastings' piece continues to offer crucial context – about why Bergdahl volunteered for service in the first place, about how this intense, moral young man became so horrified by America's "good war" that he walked away from his unit's remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan in 2009, and about the abortive negotiations that could have secured Bergdahls release years ago. Here 13...

WASHINGTON — Some legislators are going to battle with the Defense Department over Army uniform regulations they say discriminate against African-American women wearing their hair naturally.The Army issued AR 670-1 changes in a 57-page directive [1] in mid-March addressing male and female grooming standards, fingernails (“males may not wear nail polish”), jewelry, tattoos, and other items for clarification.The male standards focused on strips of hair left on otherwise shaved heads, sideburn length (no lower than the bottom of the ear opening), and how wide a regulation mustache can be (not up into the nose and not past the corners of...

SOUTH HUNTINGTON, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) – Two Long Island high school students have been suspended for allegedly bringing a Confederate flag to school. Brother Gary Cregan, principal of St. Anthony’s High School in South Huntington, said the two seniors walked in with a Confederate flag draped around their shoulders during an after-hours sporting event at the school. As CBS 2′s Kathryn Brown reported, there is outrage and disgust on Long Island. “The African-American students who immediately saw it really exercised heroic restraint and fortunately a teacher immediately confiscated the flag and took the students out of the gym,” Cregan said. The...

George Leef, director of research for the North Carolina-based John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, authored a Forbes op-ed article titled "Obama Administration Takes Groupthink To Absurd Lengths." The subtitle is "School Discipline Rates Must Be 'Proportionate.'" (http://tinyurl.com/mxnlg9h). Let's examine some of the absurdity of the Obama administration's take on student discipline. Last January, the departments of Justice and Education published a "guidance" letter describing how schools can meet their obligations under federal law to administer student discipline without discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin. Its underlying threat is that if federal bureaucrats learn...

17-year-old Gregory Vied was suspended for flying a confederate flag atop his pickup truck, "which was parked in the student lot at Steinert High School in Hamilton Township." According to News 12 New Jersey, Vied said he was suspended on March 25th after being repeatedly told he could not fly the flag.

<p>By FOX NEWS - A New Jersey high school student says he was suspended from school after refusing to remove a Confederate flag on his truck.</p> <p>Gregory Vied, 17, told News12 he was suspended for flying the flag on his pickup truck, which was parked in a student lot at Steinert High School in Hamilton Township.</p>

A longtime peace and human rights activist arrested countless times, Franciscan Fr. Jerry Zawada has been removed from public ministry for concelebrating Mass with a woman priest in 2011. The letter removing the 76-year-old's public priestly faculties -- a copy of which NCR obtained March 21 -- came from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which reviewed documentation related to the Nov. 22, 2011, liturgy Zawada concelebrated with Roman Catholic Womanpriest Janice Sevre-Duszynska. "Having carefully examined the acts of the case, and the vota of the former Minister General and the Rev. Zawada's Provincial Superior, this Dicastery...

We teach kids that honesty is the best policy, but at one Virginia Beach middle school it might be better to keep the truth to yourself. Last Thursday at Bayside Middle School, sixth grader Adrionna Harris came to the aide of a classmate who was cutting his arm. She faces expulsion for taking a razor from the student, throwing it away and convincing him what he was doing wasn’t right. She thought she was doing the right thing, so on Friday she told the school administration what happened. The way school officials responded led to this question: was the school’s...

Did an Ohio elementary school jump the gun in its punishment of a 10-year-old? Devonshire Alternative Elementary School in North Columbus, Ohio, suspended a fifth grader for three days after he pointed his finger in the shape of a gun at another student’s head. Paul Entingh said his 10-year-old son, Nathan, was just messing around during science class. "He asked his friend to borrow a pencil and when his friend dropped it, my son Nathan was playing around and he did that with his fingers. Pointed it at the kid, said 'boom,'" Entingh told Fox 28. Paul and Nathan were...

<p>A Minnesota public high school was so committed to obeying its fire drill policy to the exact letter of the law that it forced a female student–dressed only in a swimsuit, and sopping wet–to stand outside in the freezing cold for ten minutes. As a result, she suffered frostbite.</p>

America's kids have been suspended for pretending that pencils were guns, but an Ohio school may have topped that. A 10-year-old student at a Columbus elementary school was handed a three-day suspension for making a finger gun and pretending to shoot a classmate. The suspension letter more formally referred to his weapon as a "level 2 lookalike firearm," reports the Columbus Dispatch. Devonshire Alternative Elementary School's principal says students have been frequently told not to play pretend gun games, with a district rep saying kids were warned consequences would follow. Those consequences hit hard last week for fifth-grader Nathan Entingh,...

It's expected to be the most passionately debated piece of education policy for the legislative session that begins Feb. 25. Supporters say that Minnesota's current law, at 37 words, doesn't do enough to prevent bullying and that sweeping change is needed. "Nobody should be OK with the fact that all we have to protect students and make schools safe from bullying is 37 words," Kurzer-Zlotnick said. "To me, that's ridiculous." Opponents argue that the 20-page bill goes too far by taking away local control and imposing costly new layers of bureaucracy on schools. "I think it's a bad bill," said...

Ripping up the playground rulebook is having incredible effects on children at an Auckland school. Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don't cause bedlam, the principal says. The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.

End of Title: . . . to pay family billsThe mother of a student who was kicked out of high school after starring in gay porn to help pay his family's bills said she couldn't be prouder. Melyssa Lieb, from Cocoa, Florida, said she vehemently supports her son, 18-year-old Robert Marucci, who was suspended from his high school after classmates discovered his explicit career. 'I think he's the most awesome person in the world,' she told WKMG through tears. 'He stood up and he was the man of the house when I couldn't be.' Following outrage over his suspension, the...

Anyone who has still not yet understood the utter cynicism of the Obama administration in general, and Attorney General Eric Holder in particular, should look at the Justice Department's latest interventions in education. If there is one thing that people all across the ideological spectrum should be able to agree on, it is that better education is desperately needed by black youngsters, especially in the ghettoes. For most, it is their one chance for a better life. Among the few bright spots in a generally dismal picture of the education of black students are those successful charter schools or voucher...

Attorney General Eric Holder slammed schools’ disciplinary standards that result in a “disproportionate number of minorities being penalized. These school administrators may feel that they’re being fair because the same rules apply to all students. But I’m saying this kind of simplistic notion is not good enough.” Holder suggested that “differences in the subcultures of students from different racial, social, and economic backgrounds must be considered. Minorities who have been subjected to generations of oppression have a right to strike back against this oppression. An action that might justifiably be regarded as unwarranted if committed by a member of the...