Tag Archives: Department of Education

News

State employee replaced preschoolers “unhealthy” lunch with chicken nuggets

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From Fox North Carolina. (H/T Ari)

Excerpt:

A Hoke County preschooler was fed chicken nuggets for lunch because a state worker felt that her homemade lunch did not have enough nutritional value, according to a report by the Carolina Journal.

The West Hoke Elementary School student was in her More at Four classroom when a state employee who was inspecting lunch boxes decided that her packed lunch — which consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, apple juice and potato chips — “did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines,” the Journal reports.

The decision was made under consideration of a regulation put in place by the the Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services, which requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs to meet USDA guidelines.

“When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones,” the Journal reports.

The student’s mother told the Journal she received a note from the school about the incident and was charged $1.25 for the cafeteria tray, from which her daughter ate three chicken nuggets.

The note explained how students who did not bring “healthy lunches” would be offered the missing portions and that parents could be charged for the cost of the cafeteria food, the Journal reports.

My friend Wes homeschools his kids, and he read this story and asked why these parents had their kid in a government-run day care in the first place.

I think that the reason why is because the family probably pays 30% in taxes already, including being forced to pay for public schools that often don’t provide a quality education. They have no money left over for private schools after paying for failing public schools, and every other ridiculous life-equalization social program. It’s amazing to me how parents have money automatically deducted from their pockets to pay for schools that do things like this to their children. And the answer is, of course, to stop funding public schools directly and provide parents with a voucher, so that parents can choose the education option that works for them.

News

NYC mayor Bloomberg tries to ban churches from using schools after hours

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From the NY Post. (H/T Joy) There’s a petition to sign at the bottom of this post.

Excerpt:

Come Feb. 12, Mayor Bloomberg and the city Department of Education are set to ban religious groups from off-hour use of public schools for worship services. This contradicts New York City’s commitment to diversity, freedom of expression and accommodation of diverse religious beliefs — and there’s still time to reverse course.

[…]The US Supreme Court last month opted not to review a lower-court decision upholding the city’s “unequal access” policy. But even that ruling (by the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit) did notmandatethe city’s policy, but merely said the Constitution permits it.

In fact, no other major school district in the nation has a ban anything like New York’s extreme anti-worship policy. That’s why regular rallies across the city are urging the mayor to repeal this senseless targeting of religious groups.

By state law, the city opens its 1,200 schools on weeknights and weekends to community groups for any use “pertaining to the welfare of the community.” The public schools allow thousands of organizations — scout troops, labor unions, arts groups, etc. — to hold meetings, concerts and recitals. They’ve even allowed “Law and Order” to film in the schools.

Why single out religious groups and churches, by prohibiting them from conducting worship services in vacant schools when students are gone?

Bronx Household of Faith, a small evangelical church formed in 1971, triggered the current controversy in 1995 when it filed a lawsuit challenging the policy after being denied its request to meet in a public school. The federal district court in Manhattan issued an injunction in 2002 that stopped the city from enforcing the policy.

So for nine years, religious groups have met in public schools — and helped their communities by painting school buildings, offering academic help to all students and providing services to disabled children, people learning English and those seeking counseling and spiritual comfort. The “faith communities” have been good neighbors, bettering the quality of life in the city by helping those in need.

You can sign a petition here to stop the mayor from carrying out his plan. The petition is hosted by Truth in Action / Coral Ridge Ministries.

In other news, Bloomberg is pushing for more gun control as well.

News

How the left uses “bullying” to restrict free speech that offends them

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From Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Full text: (links removed)

A school superintendant has labeled a column in a school newspaper thatcriticized homosexuality as “bullying.” (The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that was labeled as “bullying” answered the question “no.” The school district also publicly apologized for the column, and said that it is “taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.”)

Whatever the wisdom (or lack thereof) of featuring something like that in a school newspaper, it seems strange to argue that a viewpoint in a student newspaper is “bullying.” (The Shawano School District’s bullying policy provides that “bullying” may lead to “warning, suspension,” “expulsion,” etc.) A conservative Christian who thought that homosexuality was immoral successfully challenged a school “harassment” code that punished students with such viewpoints in Saxe v. State College Area School District(2001), a case in which a federal appeals court ruled that there is no “harassment” exception to the First Amendment for speech which offends members of minority groups. Speech cannot be banned simply by labeling it as violence, either: for example, in Bauer v.Sampson, another federal appeals court ruled that a campus newspaper’s illustration depicting a college official’s imaginary death was protected by the First Amendment, even though the college declared it a violation of its policy against “workplace violence.”

But schools and anti-bullying activists have adopted incredibly overbroad definitions of bullying. The anti-bullying website NoBully.com, and schools like Fox Hill and Alvarado Elementary, define even “eye rolling” and other expressions of displeasure or hostility as bullying, even though doing so raises First Amendment problems.

The Obama administration claims bullying is an “epidemic” and a “pandemic.” But in reality, bullying and violence have steadily gone down in the nation’s schools, as studies funded by the Justice Department have shown. The Obama administration’s StopBullying.gov website defines a vast array of speech and conduct as bullying: it classifies “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.” Since “creating web sites” that “make fun of others” also is deemed “cyberbullying,” conservative websites that poke fun at the president are presumably guilty of cyberbullying under this strange definition. (Law professors such as UCLA’s Eugene Volokh have criticized bills by liberal lawmakers like Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) that would ban some criticism of politicians as cyberbullying.)

It’s very important to understand what liberals mean when they say “bullying” and how they use it to silence those who might offend them. It’s using government power to force individuals to accept the morality of the state. There’s a word for that.