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‘Last month, the New York Times published an article about Hillsdale College and its Barney Charter School Initiative. As we’ve grown accustomed to expecting from the past year of misinformation, the article was misleading and dishonest. The article serves, however, as an opportunity to remind everyone what exactly these charter schools are and illuminate their purpose.
Probably the occasion for this article was the state of the state address in Tennessee, where Governor Bill Lee mentioned that he was asking Hillsdale College to help with charter schools in the state. This set off a firestorm that touches the most powerful political and educational forces in the land. They are bureaucracies, ruling in the name of their “expertise.” Anyone not a member in good standing of this bureaucratic system is an invader. The articles critical of us and everybody else doing charter schools imply that this bureaucracy is the essence of public education. We hold to the old view that teachers, students, and parents make up the public schools.
Each of our charter schools is a civic project involving hundreds of people from their local community. Often, those involved have school-aged children or grandchildren. If not, they are citizens who care deeply for the families and children who live in their city or town. They educate these kids because they love them—they want to show them things that are beautiful, true, and good.
And so these people—most of them are volunteers, mind you—spend countless hours learning how to manage a school, how to start sports leagues and band programs, create budgets, establish a board, draft applications, or find a school building. Founding a school is difficult, but these people do it for the sake of others—that’s a noble thing.
Why do they work so hard to open these schools in particular? It is because these schools want to help their children become wise, but also become good. Hillsdale charter schools offer an education in the classical liberal arts, emphasizing science, mathematics, literature, and history, but also teaching the arts, Latin, civics, philosophy, and ethics. The purpose of such an education is to form the hearts and minds of its students—to strengthen their characters as well as their intellects.
By the time these schools open, they are big, effective, and excellent. They go on to hire headmasters who know how to build a school culture and make the trains run on time. They attract dynamic teachers who love their subjects because they too have been personally transformed by them. Within a few years, they rank among the best in their districts and states.
When he visited the United States in 1831 and 1832, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the American spirit of community in his book, Democracy in America: “In no country in the world do the citizens make such exertions for the commonwealth; and I am acquainted with no people which has established schools as numerous and as efficacious … better suited to the wants of the inhabitants.” At our charter schools, these efforts continue for the sake of an education better suited to the needs of the community.
Our charter schools are the work of their communities and those who live in them. They are built with love, and they take on the character of the people and communities that built them. And so, the students flourish there.
In stark contrast to much of what is reported in the news today, the students and parents at these schools are happy. Parents love seeing their children grow into fine young men and women, and the students are proud to see it in themselves, as well.
We use the Latin words alma mater when we refer to our former place of education. The words mean “nurturing mother”—I cannot think of a more nurturing educational environment than these schools.’ An Email from Hillsdale College’s president, Dr. Larry Arnn
‘A Colorado mother was cut off at her local school board meeting after trying to read out a sexually explicit passage from a book she said was available to children in the school district.
The mother, identifying herself as D. Barnes, spoke at a March 16 school board meeting for Adams 12 Five Star Schools, which serves Denver’s northeastern outskirts. She told board members that she was “very concerned” about the material that children have access to through their schooling.
“I do not favor book banning,” she said to the audience, many of whom had spoken before her either in support or opposition to the district’s policy regarding “gender non-conforming” and transgender students. “But I do want to tell you that pornography does not belong in our schools.”
Barnes specifically took issue with two books: “Gender Queer,” a graphic novel by Maia Kobabe, and “Lawn Boy,” a young adult novel by Jonathan Evison. She said that young children have access to these titles “via online resources that Adams 12 made possible.”
“Alison Bechdel writes ‘Fun Home’ about discovering masturbation soon after her first period,” Barnes began reading from “Gender Queer.”
“I discovered around the same age followed by the further realization that my ability to become aroused was governed by a strict law of diminishing returns, an elaborate fantasy based on Plato’s Symposium. The more I had to interact with my genitals, the less likely I was to reach a point of satisfaction. The best fantasy was one that did not require any physical touch at all.”
She then continued to read a section detailing the use of a new sex toy and various associated quotes.
It was at this point that the board decided Barnes was “out of order” and demanded she stop reading. “This is your first warning,” a board member said.
“This is a book that is accessible in Adams 12,” the mother protested as that board member asked her to refrain from reading further. “This is what you allow in our schools. This is what you allow for our kids to have access to. This is pornography and this is grooming for pedophilia.”
Another board member suggested restoring Barnes’s time so long as she agreed to keep the content “appropriate for K-12.” The apparent irony prompted several attendees in the audience to speak out in frustration.
“But it’s in the library. You made it appropriate,” a man yelled.
Barnes moved on to describe her feelings when she discovered “Lawn Boy” was available to high school students in the district.
“I was livid, I was angry, I was hurt that this was accessible to our children,” she said, arguing that the book should be treated the same way as “Playboy” or “Penthouse,” which don’t deserve a place in schools in the first place, she added.
The video of the four-hour meeting has been on the Adams 12’s YouTube since March, but has recently gone viral on social media after a two-minute clip of the exchange was shared by popular Twitter account LibsofTikTok.
In a statement regarding Barnes’s comments, Adams 12 said the district has just one copy of “Lawn Boy.”
“Members of the community have the opportunity to challenge school library materials currently held in district-managed schools,” the district stated. “At the current time, one copy of ‘Lawn Boy’ is held at one of our high school libraries and ‘Gender Queer’ is not held in any of the school libraries of district-managed schools.”’https://www.theepochtimes.com/colorado-school-board-cuts-off-mom-for-reading-out-sex-scene-from-book-available-to-students_4460490.html?est=8rmYXWc6p2mknR63oGnEWhGKYXrHPGtakMQJcZoyQKTIQcPH3C5J9zsygRpujBc0aA%3D%3D
The speech begins at about 3 hours into the meeting.
‘How dare Maine parents raise questions about the education of their children!
Who do they think they are?
After all, Maine’s K-12 public schools are doing an outstanding job preparing the next generation of Mainers for meaningful careers, further education, and good citizenship. We’re getting a great return on the hundreds of millions of dollars we spend every year on public education, aren’t we?
OK, I’m being sarcastic.
In fact, I believe sarcasm and ridicule are entirely appropriate in response to a lame Leftist hit piece attacking me for calling attention to what’s going on in Maine’s failing and dysfunctional public schools.
Titled, Book bans: Marginalized people deserve to have their stories told, the column by Aspen Ruhlin was published by the Maine Beacon, the online propaganda organ of the radically woke Maine Peoples Alliance. Ruhlin is a self-proclaimed “queer” transgender advocate who uses the plural pronouns “they” and “their,” and works at a Bangor abortion clinic.
Ruhlin cites the Hampden school district (Regional School Unit 22) in eastern Maine as a hotbed of right-wing opposition to what she refers to as the “bogeyman” of Critical Race Theory, and she singles me out as one of the leaders “in the fight against literature” at Hampden schools.
Here’s the rest of the story.
Three years ago, during my last of four terms in the Maine House of Representatives, I sponsored a bill to outlaw political indoctrination in Maine’s K-12 public-school classrooms. Based on model legislation drafted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the proposed legislation would have barred teachers from singling out one racial group of students as responsible for the suffering or inequities of another racial group of students.
In a nutshell, that’s exactly what Critical Race Theory (CRT) does.
The public hearing on the bill drew strong support and voluminous testimony from scores of parents and taxpayers across the state, who provided first-hand accounts of the overt left-wing bias in K-12 classroom instruction. But the education committee sided with the teachers’ unions and their allies in the Maine Department of Education who opposed the legislation, so the bill never made it to the full Legislature for a vote.
Last year the bill was introduced again, prompting another round of passionate testimony in committee that resulted in a party-line vote to advance the bill to the full Legislature. After a robust floor debate in the House and Senate, the bill was defeated on a party-line vote in both chambers, an outcome that sets the stage for making CRT indoctrination an issue in state legislative races this year.
With that legislative history in mind, let’s examine Ruhlin’s claim that conservatives are pushing for “book bans” in Hampden and elsewhere across Maine.
First of all, nobody I know is proposing to “ban” any books. Parents who want their children exposed to the racist, revolutionary claptrap known as Critical Race Theory are free to purchase that material on their own dime. The same goes for the demented LGBTQ+ propaganda that encourages kids in elementary school to pick their preferred pronouns and choose among dozens of different genders.
Let’s not “ban” these books. Just keep that woke rubbish out of public-school libraries, and off teachers’ recommended reading lists. That’s all parents are asking of their servants who sit on local school boards.
In Hampden, I filed several Freedom of Access Act (FOAA) requests to find out the extent to which the district was engaged in CRT brainwashing. After some initial foot-dragging and stone-walling, superintendent Regan Nickels provided me with the requested public records.
What I discovered is that the school district paid thousands of dollars for teacher training material that reeks of racial profiling, racial stereotyping, and racial scapegoating. Hosted by the Augusta-based non-profit Cultural Competence Institute, these online trainings are grounded in the sacred texts of the CRT cult, including the rabidly racist “White Fragility” by Robin Diangelo.
My FOAA request only confirmed what was already obvious: that the Hampden school district is deeply infected with the twin plagues of CRT indoctrination and LGBTQ+ gender-bender madness.
That became clear late last year when the Maine Department of Education (MDOE) named Kelsey Stoyanova, a middle school teacher in the district, the Maine Teacher of the Year. The educrats in Augusta specifically cited Stoyanova’s recommended reading list for students as a key factor in her selection.
The MDOE press release praised Stoyanova for highlighting BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Color) and LGBTQIA+ authors. Silly me! I thought showing preference for someone based on their skin color is the textbook definition of racism. But never mind.
Stoyanova’s copied-and-pasted-from-the-internet reading list is a mother lode of woke propaganda that promotes racial scapegoating and normalizes kinky sex for minor children. One of the children’s books she recommends is titled “Middle School’s a Drag,” a fun-filled fictional celebration of a 13-year-old drag queen.
I could go on and on and on detailing the pornographic content both on Stoyanova’s reading list and in the libraries of the Hampden school district, but I think I’ve made my point. In any case, Ruhlin herself puts a bold-faced exclamation point on this madness with her praise for “Gender Queer”, an illustrated book with graphic depictions of minor children engaged in fellatio. It’s on the shelves of the Bonny Eagle High School library in rural Cumberland County in southern Maine.
In closing, consider this: Maine’s K-12 public schools have dumbed down students to such a degree that educational assessment test results are in the tank. And they were in the tank long before the COVID lockdowns. Whether it’s reading or math or science, our local indoctrination centers are stuck in a rut where more than half of Maine students are below or well below grade level in these basic subject areas.
That’s a scandal in and of itself. Coupled with partisan political indoctrination and X-rated kiddie porn, “scandalous” is much too mild a term to describe what’s going on in Maine’s government-run K-12 schools.’https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/racial-profiling-kiddie-porn-replace-three-rs-lawrence-lockman/
‘Christian parents Nigel and Sally Rowe have been fighting their case since 2017. Now, finally, a High Court judge has ruled that they can take their case to a judicial review of transgender affirming policies in English primary schools. The evidence of harm that these policies do in schools is overwhelming. Nigel and Sally spoke to LBC Radio about how the 500+ pages of expert evidence is being ignored by the government. Sally explained: “We can see the evidence in front of us now, up and down the country in schools where these policies have been embedded into primary schools; where there has been an actual promotion of this ideology, there has also been a massive escalate of child referrals to the gender clinic – 3000% in a decade.” Nigel explained further: “The problem is that the evidence isn’t really being looked at – firstly by the government, but also most parents and staff are actually ignorant of the evidence, too … they’re just told this is the ideology, we must embrace it.” One such expert, Mr Rogers, a consultant psychologist with 30 years experience in the field of psychology, warned in his report that the Cornwall Guidelines “showed little or no appreciation for the safety and welfare of children.” In his 140-page report, Mr Rogers also made the crucial point that 88% who experience gender dysphoria as children will no longer suffer from gender dysphoria by their mid-30s.’
The Government is NOT the Parent! Parents are responsible for their children including their education and what they read! However, in the state of Virginia BIG government has assumed they are in charge. Well, here is one woman that let them know they aren’t!
‘A Virginia mother has been blocked from entering her son’s public high school library weeks after she complained about books in the collection being pornographic, according to a new report.
Stacy Langton told the Washington Examiner Monday that Fairfax Principal Maureen Keck told her she was not allowed to enter the library anymore.’
Langton’s impassioned school board address went viral after the moderator cut her off before her two minutes were up and tried to introduce the next speaker.
Books that mother Stacy Langton objected to having in her son’s public school.
The two books she complained about – “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison and “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe – were taken off the library’s shelves pending a review, The Fairfax Times reported last month.
Attorney General Merrick Garland came under fire early last month after issuing a memo tasking the FBI with probing what he called a disturbing spike in harassment and threats of violence against school leaders and teachers.
GARLAND DENIES DOJ LABELLING PARENTS AS DOMESTIC TERRORISTS
The announcement followed a letter from the National School Boards Association to President Biden calling the alleged increase in violence and threats against public school officials a form of “domestic terrorism.”
Langton told Fox News that since speaking out publicly she and her family have received countless threats.
“I’m not getting a lot of sleep right now, nobody’s sleeping in my house because we can’t be sure that we’re safe,” she said.
Langton and the Fairfax County School couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.’ https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-mom-barred-son-public-school-library-books’
‘A young girl who wanted to wear her faith on her mask never expected it to be a problem at school but that is what happened.
Lydia Booth told the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) she simply liked wearing the mask to show her faith in Jesus. She also said, “It makes me feel like I’m protected by Jesus.”
She says she believed others would “think it’s a great mask, and that Jesus is a great God, and a great Savior.”
School officials told her she couldn’t wear it because of a policy not allowing masks with political or religious messages. However, Lydia’s mother, Jennifer, checked the handbook and dress code and didn’t find that restriction.
She also discovered that masks with sports logos and other messages like “Black Lives Matter” were allowed.
The Booth family reached out to ADF for help and it filed a lawsuit against her school district.
ADF reminded the school system that they “can’t pick and choose which messages students are allowed to express and which they aren’t. And they certainly can’t single out religious speech for worse treatment than other types of speech.”’https://www.faithwire.com/2021/05/17/school-blocks-little-girl-from-jesus-loves-me-mask-but-her-faith-is-still-making-an-impact/?utm_source=cbn&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news-eu-faithwire&utm_content=20210517-2349404&inid=5f29ebc0-7f5b-eb11-b823-005056af0da1
How do some of these people get voted onto these boards? Stupidity isn’t silent!
‘It happened again. Granted, this example has a dash more of woke salt in it, but it’s still another school board that’s about to deal with a mic fiasco. It’s also a boomer moment as these clowns didn’t know that their video call was being broadcast publicly. Chardá Bell-Fontenot, the vice president of the La Mesa-Spring Valley School Board outside of San Diego, said that reopening schools was akin to slavery and an exercise in white supremacy. The Daily Caller’s Jorge Ventura has the clips and notes that Ms. Bell-Fontenot seems unaware that everything she is saying could be viewed by the general public.’ For videos of these meetings go to https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/25/radical-school-board-member-says-reopening-schools-is-white-supremacy-n2585340?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=02/25/2021&bcid=08b5a1e2f2263b83e918fb56d7a12a3e&recip=26169367
The Australian state of New South Wales has a make believe conservative government. For example, this government has not only destroyed the energy grid but is allowing the public schools to teach a hatred for those who are not Leftists! A few more years and China will call NSW home!
‘POLITICAL INDOCTRINATION RAMPANT IN NSW SCHOOLS!NSW schools are meant to be politically NEUTRAL places, so why are kids at North Newtown Public School having “woke” political ideas imposed upon them instead of doing the spelling lessons they so badly need???’ #nswpol#auspol#onenationDAILYTELEGRAPH.COM.AU
whatyareckon 