Free Republic

An Illinois school district's leaders heard from upset parents after the children started talking about what they were learning about LGBT sex in school. They responded so badly, they should resign.Last week I wrote about a suburban Chicago school district’s Oct. 7-11 week of LGBT curriculum as an example of what the state legislature has required all Illinois public schools to teach starting next July. Although the Evanston/Skokie school district is in a very liberal area, not all parents were comfortable with their preschoolers being taught, among other things, that polyamorous families are equivalent to families of sexually faithful married...

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Surveillance video obtained first by KOIN 6 News shows the dramatic moment when Parkrose High School football coach Keanon Lowe disarmed a student carrying a loaded shotgun on campus. Angel Granados-Diaz was 18 when he brought the gun to school on May 17. The video — obtained Friday from the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office through a public records request — is the visual accompaniment to the story recounted by Lowe during a press conference earlier this year.

Officials at Baylor University, one of the largest Christian universities in the nation, are working to forge some sort of peace treaty between a conservative club on campus and an unofficial student group that supports gay rights as tension between the two continue to fester. The Young Americans for Freedom chapter and the campus club “GAY” (which stands for Gamma Alpha Upsilon, or the word gay in Greek letters), is scheduled to meet sometime in the next week or so with campus leaders, who instigated the meeting. At issue is GAY’s agressive objections to and active lobbying against YAF for...

The mother of an 8-year-old boy who was found hanging in a Pennsylvania basement last month alongside his 4-year-old sister told a 911 dispatcher he had been bullied and "had made threats of doing this but didn't want to go alone." The dispatcher further quoted the mother as saying that sadly the boy, Connor Snyder, “may be the aggressor,” Fox 10 Philadelphia reported Thursday. Lisa Snyder, 36, called 911 after reporting finding Connor and her daughter Brinley hanging from the basement rafters of their home in Albany Township with a dog leash on Sept. 23. Connor and his sister died...

A school district in Georgia has been forced to revoke rules they recently imposed to accommodate transgender students after an outcry from concerned parents.The Pickens County School District said on Wednesday they would be returning to their traditional bathroom policies until they can consult with law enforcement.The statement read:"There have been many serious safety concerns raised in the past few days. School board members, staff, and students have been threatened due to the administration's implementation of Adams vs. St. John's County School District."

Members of the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike on Thursday as 27,000 educators began picketing near schools at 6:30 a.m. The strike leaves 300,000 students unsure of when they will return to school. The union listed thirteen demands on its website, which include salary raises for all school employees, smaller class sizes, and hiring more support staff such as teacher’s assistants. “Our students deserve smaller class sizes. They deserve nurses. They deserve social workers. They deserve bilingual educators,” special education teacher Linda Perales told CNN School social worker Emily Penn said teachers face a continuing struggle to work in...

There’s a long-standing tradition at many high schools across the fruited plain – when you become a senior you get to paint your parking spot. This year that tradition is causing big problems, especially for teenage supporters of President Trump. At Calhoun High School in Texas a teenage boy had decorated his parking spot with a painting of a John Deere tractor along with the words “Trump 2020.” “My son was called into the principal’s office and told to paint over the Trump 2020 on his spot,” Krystal Stringham told ToddStarnes.com. “He asked the principal why, and was told it...

If you need an accurate update on some of the madness at the nation's institutions of higher learning, check out Minding the Campus, a nonprofit independent organization. John Leo, its editor in chief, says that the organization's prime mission is dedicated to the revival of intellectual pluralism and the best traditions of liberal education at America's colleges and universities. Leo's most recent compilation of campus madness leaves one nearly breathless. In a USA Today op-ed, Emily Walton, a sociology professor at Dartmouth University, said that all college students should take a mandatory course on black history and white privilege. She...

After months of controversy, the Eastern Lancaster County District in Pennsylvania has approved a plan to build non-gender specific locker rooms and changing areas, according to WGAL. The renovation project comes after a transgender student, who was born female but identifies as male, was allowed by the district to use the boys' locker room. The proposed plan could be a map to the future in the Elanco School District. "It's been a difficult, long journey the last seven to nine months but that long difficult journey has produced a product that I think is a win for everyone," said Superintendent...

FULL TITLE: The US needs 307,000 more teachers than it currently has — but few are taking the job due to low pay The student population is growing — and not enough teaching jobs are available to keep up.A new report found that since the Great Recession of 2008, the country lost 60,000 jobs in education. Not only that, but 247,000 more teaching jobs should have been created to keep up with growing student enrollment as the population increases. This has resulted in a shortfall of 307,000 teaching jobs — meaning there are over 300,000 educators currently needed right now....

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take the case of a public school teacher who required her students to recite the Islamic "conversion prayer" or receive a failing grade. The Thomas More Law Center is defending Caleigh Wood, a Christian student in 11th grade at La Plata High School in La Plata, Maryland. Wood refused to deny her faith "by making a written profession of the Muslim conversion prayer known as the shahada – 'There is no god by allah and Muhammad is the messenger of allah,'" Thomas More said. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled...

Last week School District 65, which serves the racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse Evanston and Skokie, Illinois communities, went whole hog on disseminating a controversial ideology to captive audiences of other people’s children who came to school with open minds and hearts into which “progressives” poured poison masquerading as inarguable truth. District 65’s celebration of “LGBTQ+ Equity Week” offers a glimpse into the kind of pernicious indoctrination that the cunningly named “Inclusive Curriculum” bill signed into law by Governor J. B. Pritzker will bring to Illinois school children.

(A look back. This article was first published seven years ago. The public didn't know this sort of information, but you can be sure the people running education knew everything. Did they move to fix things? No! Everything got worse and more reckless until the big cheating scandal broke this year and we had the spectacle of athletic coaches accepting bribes to say that kids played sports they had never played. K-16 in America has become increasingly corrupt.) ––––––––––– Pundits routinely assert there is a cheating epidemic in American education. A few statistics can confirm the extent of the problem....

A Tisbury School crossing guard has been relieved of duty and had his personal firearms confiscated for alleged threats to the Tisbury School overheard by a waitress at Linda Jean’s restaurant in Oak Bluffs. Stephen Nichols, 84, of Tisbury, who said his career with the Tisbury Police spanned six decades and who served in the United States Army during the Korean War, told The Times he made no threats to the school, but had criticized its school resource officer in a conversation with a friend. He said the conversation was taken out of context. Update: Re-instated

A couple of years ago, a retired teacher who stays in close touch with history teachers across Texas told me something disturbing. Like most states, Texas has standardized testing. Unlike most states, Texas requires public school students to study Texas history in the 4th and 7th grades. Texas history is red in tooth and claw and full of big personalities and big ideas. Standardized testing is forcing teachers to drop about half of the second semester of Texas history to focus on U.S. history -- not to deepen students' understanding of American history, but to teach to the standardized tests....

SYNOPSIS The First Amendment and the very idea of free speech are under attack in America today. A growing number of Americans don't believe you have the right to speak your mind if what you have to say might offend someone, somewhere. They advocate for "safe spaces" in which people won't be offended by ideas they may find troubling. But is that what America is about? In No Safe Spaces, comedian and podcast king Adam Carolla and radio talk show host Dennis Prager travel the country, talking to experts on the right and left, tour college campuses and examine their...

A Christian school governor with decades of service has been suspended after saying that she would not have wanted her two sons to read books with LGBT themes. Maureen Griffith, 73, who worked as an NHS nurse for 40 years, was a governor at Alperton Community School in Brent, northwest London, for more than 20 years. In May she received a letter telling her that she had been suspended from the governing body after two complaints alleging that she had made “homophobic comments at a public meeting”. She now fears she will be sacked. The row comes days before the...

Cecile Richards may no longer be the leader of Planned Parenthood, but that doesn’t mean she’s done spreading her pro-abortion message. After leaving the organization in 2018, Richards wrote a memoir, Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead. The book received glowing reviews from Hillary Clinton and Gloria Steinem, but no children could be compelled to pick up the 200-plus page memoir. As all activists know, you have to make disciples young, so Richards rewrote the book for a more impressionable audience. The young readers edition of Make Trouble comes out later this month. To...

He was a self-proclaimed Antifa activist… and also a professor at John Jay College.  He also advocated for the death of cops and for anarchy in America.  Now Michael Isaacson has found himself back on the unemployment line.Or perhaps back in his parents’ basement.Initially, his tweets that it is a privilege to teach “future dead cops” and his statements were merely condemned. Mike Isaacson@VulgarEconomics   how come when a pig dies in uniform no one ever says 'they died doing what they loved?'  5 10:10 AM - Jan 23, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy   See Mike Isaacson's other...

The white students gathered around the fire, speculating why parts of the book were not already engulfed in flames. “It’s a hard cover!” shouts one male student in a video amid laughs as ripped-out pages burn, torn from a novel written by a Hispanic author who had suggested white people are treated differently in society. That angered some students at Georgia Southern University. In response to Jennine Capó Crucet’s talk on the Statesboro, Ga., campus Wednesday, where she focused her discussion on white privilege, students gathered at a grill and torched her novel “Make Your Home Among Strangers” — about...