Free Republic

A North Texas student was punished recently for wearing an American flag T-shirt to school. An administrator at Seagoville High School determined that the shirt violated the dress code...an administrator asked Jaegur to lift his hoodie. “Underneath that shirt, he was wearing [the American flag] shirt,” said Shelly. When Jaegur lifted his hoodie, he was sent to in-school suspension...

A Dobson High School Advanced Placement government class with strong opinions about Barack Obama watched the president's speech Wednesday on a small, grainy TV in the corner of their classroom. Some of the students attentively watched the speech, giving questioning looks and comments, shaking their heads and laughing at some of Obama's words. Other students listened, occasion ally glancing up to watch, while texting on their cell phones, reading a book or finishing school work. The gymnasium's events were shown simultaneously in rooms throughout the Mesa school, and teachers were given discretion on whether to show the speech, the students...

02.10.09MARINE VETERAN KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL FOR POSSESSING FIREARMS WOU STUDENT TRIED, CONVICTED AND SENTENCED.The WOU student who was falsely arrested and charged with possession of a firearm in a public building, had all his criminal charges dropped by the Polk County DA tonight.The DA admitted no wrongdoing on his part, or on the part of the police who arrested Jeff Maxwell for a "crime" that does not exist.In a statement released to OFF's attorney, the DA said "I believe the Monmouth Police Department issued the citation in good faith and that there was an arguable violation. However, a careful...

January 21, 2009 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Almost from its inception, the Weather Underground [WU] was viewed with great concern by the FBI. As a result, the decision was made to place a high level informant within the group to help keeps tabs on its members' activities. That person was Larry Grathwohl, a Vietnam veteran and the only publicly identified FBI informant who succeeded in penetrating the Weather Underground, serving in that capacity from August 1969 until April 1970. Prior to his service in the FBI, he was a member of the Cincinnati Police force. PipeLineNews.org contacted...

Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted public competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General. That was just one example of questionable CPS actions detailed in the inspector general's 2008 annual report. Others included high school staffers changing grades to pump up transcripts of student athletes and workers at a restricted-enrollment grade school falsifying addresses to get relatives admitted. In the case of the cappuccino machines, central office administrators...

Perhaps the most important argument against same-sex marriage is that once society honors same-sex sex as it does man-woman sex, there will inevitably be a major increase in same-sex sex. People do sexually (as in other areas) what society allows and especially what it honors. One excellent example illustrating this is an article recently written in the McGill University newspaper by McGill student Anna Montrose. In it, she wrote: "It's hard to go through four years of a Humanities B.A. reading Foucault and Butler and watching 'The L Word' and keep your rigid heterosexuality intact. I don't know when it...

Randolph Elementary School parents and guardians received messages Thursday about a 10-year-old boy who showed off a broken BB gun on his way home from school Wednesday afternoon. According to police, the boy showed the gun to three other students. The students told their parents, who reported the incident to the school. School officials then told police. Capt. Jim Davidsaver said officers contacted the boy at his home Thursday, recovered the BB gun, cited him for disturbing the peace and referred him to the Lancaster County Attorney’s Office. According to an e-mail sent to parents, the school has taken disciplinary...

Thousands of academics have signed an online petition in support of Bill Ayers, the 1960s-radical-turned-college professor whose ties to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama were a matter of hot dispute in Wednesday night's debate. The petition, which has circulated through university faculties across the nation, says critics of Ayers, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, are trying to "intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue." More than 3,200 have signed the petition. The petition represents a rare attempt to defend Ayers, whose name has become a political epithet. Republicans have called him a "domestic terrorist," and...

A recent California Court of Appeals decision ruled that parents who want to home-school their children must be certified teachers in that state. The home-schooling community across the country has reacted to this decision with outrage, insisting they are entitled and equipped to educate their own children, and that certification ensures neither better teaching skills nor better-educated children. But many others applaud the decision, believing that certification is necessary to ensure a consistent, standards-based education and keep students from falling behind. YES from experts in the field: Marty Hittelman, a Los Angeles community college math teacher, is president of the...

Excerpt: 21 (105 ILCS 110/3) (from Ch. 122, par. 863) 22 Sec. 3. Comprehensive Health Education Program. 23-33 (a) The program established under this Act shall include, but not be limited to, the following major educational areas as a basis for curricula in all elementary and secondary schools in this State: human ecology and health, human growth and development, the emotional, psychological, physiological, hygienic and social responsibilities of family life, including sexual abstinence and prevention of unintended pregnancy until marriage, prevention and control of disease, including age appropriate instruction in grades K 6 through 12 on the prevention of sexually...

Giving American home educators a taste of what's to come if the U.S. government continues down the path of European-style socialism, Utah Judge Scott Johansen recently ordered, per a bureaucratic paperwork glitch, the removal of a homeschool mother's children if she refused to enroll them in public school. As if that were not bizarre enough, the mother, Denise Mafi, was threatened with two years jail time if her children failed to show up for class without a physician's note excusing them.

The Seattle Public school system may be finding itself in more hot water, following dustups over last fall’s “Myth Of Thanksgiving” incident, and last summer’s “Exploring White Privilege” conference. A reliable source has informed ORBUSMAX that at least one Obama supporter was caught openly selling Obama for President t-shirts, “on Seattle Public School premises during an official School District Training” for teachers, yesterday and today, at the Aki Kurose Middle school. The source says they overheard the Obama supporter being told by an attendee of the training on Monday that the table display was inappropriate and may be in violation...

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A controversial legal ruling that outlawed most forms of home schooling in California will face greater scrutiny because the underlying family court case was dismissed earlier this week. News of the decision broke Friday as thousands of members of the Christian Home Educators Assn. of California met in Long Beach, where they opened with: "We pray God you deliver home-schoolers in California from the mouth of the lion. . . . Change the hearts of these judges, we pray." The issue remains in legal limbo. On Thursday, the family court judge terminated its jurisdiction over two of the eight children...

This month 3,700 recent college grads will begin Teach for America's five-week boot camp, before heading off for two-year stints at the nation's worst public schools. Teach for America offers smart young people something even better than money – the chance to avoid the vast education bureaucracy. Participants need only pass academic muster and attend the summer training before entering a classroom. If they took the traditional route into teaching, they would have to endure years of "education" courses to be certified. On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially...

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. (WCCO) ― Flying the Confederate flag has long been controversial in Southern states but now it's causing a heated debate at Kennedy High School in Bloomington, Minn. Three seniors who displayed the flag will not be allowed to attend their graduation ceremony Wednesday evening. "It was sitting like that in the parking lot," said Justin Thompson, as he held a Confederate flag that was hanging from a pole inside a pick-up truck bed. On Tuesday, three seniors, each with a rebel flag on the back of their pick-ups, parked at Kennedy High School. "I'm just a country type...

The state Education Department on Monday directed a Minnesota charter school to "correct" two areas related to religion at the school. Tarik ibn Zayad Academy, which focuses on Middle Eastern culture and shares a mosque with the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, came under fire after a teacher alleged that the school was offering religious instruction in Islam to its students. Charter schools in Minnesota are publicly funded and must be nonsectarian. The allegations first surfaced in an article by Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten. The Education Department subsequently began a review of the suburban Inver Grove Heights school and...

A group of Fairview High School students is suspected of organizing an after-school "fight club" that involved at least 12 students and as many as 60 spectators. Boulder police spokeswoman Sarah Huntley said Thursday that 10 Fairview students, all boys, have been ticketed on suspicion of public brawling. Police think they were part of a club of friends that regularly met near the South Boulder Recreation Center for public "street fighting." "Apparently, they were gathering in the field after school hours ... where they were engaging in fights," Huntley said. "They see this as sort of a recreational, spectator-type sport...

A three-judge panel of the California Court of Appeal has determined parents in that state have no legal right to home school. A Christian attorney in Sacramento says unless the ruling is reversed, literally thousands of students in the Golden State will be subject to criminal sanctions. (click here for special webcast starting at 2 p.m. CST) California Justice H. Walter Croskey has stated in an opinion that "parents who fail to [comply with school enrollment laws] may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction, and subject to imposition of fines or an order...

When Curtis Williams took the field for the Huskies' 2000 season opener, the University of Washington's media guide described him like this: Senior, strong safety, 5-foot-10, 200 pounds. Named, in 1999, the team's best hitter. Led team in solo tackles. Went to high school in Fresno, Calif., where he was a top recruit. The seventh of eight kids. Pursuing a degree in American ethnic studies. Here's what the media guide didn't say: When Williams played against Idaho, he had a warrant out for his arrest. He'd been arrested every year he was here: 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000. He was...