Why Wait Until You Are Sued?

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What is it with school districts and putting up the Ten Commandments? Do they really think that no one is going to notice? Do they think everyone who sees them is OK with it and won't say anything? I just don't get it.

Officials in Giles County Public Schools, acting on a school board vote, removed controversial displays of the Ten Commandments this morning from various buildings, said Amanda Tickle, board clerk and executive secretary in the school system.

The Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation threatened Jan. 20 to sue in federal court to get the religious writings taken down.

I am glad they are removing but they never should have been there to begin with. Why did they way to get sued?

Another Fine Post from: No 2 Religion - Just Say No!

Yet Another School Disrtict Being Investigated for Civil Rights Violations

I have posted before about school districts being investigated by the Office of Civil Rights. This time we have a school district being investigated after a NAACP complaint was filed against the board for eliminating racial diversity through reassignments and disproportional suspension of minority students.

Wake School Board Under Probe
By T. Keung Hui, Thomas Goldsmith, and Mandy Locke, The News & Observer, N.C. (MCT)

Wake County school leaders will have to defend their student assignment and discipline policies to federal civil rights investigators responding to complaints filed by the NAACP.
The Office of Civil Rights investigates a third of the 6,900 complaints it receives each year, according to Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman of the U.S. Department of Education. Wake was notified about the investigation in a letter dated Nov. 5. Bradshaw said they typically try to complete investigations within six months.
If the school system is declared in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Wake could lose about $80 million a year in federal funding.
Word of the Wake review comes near the end of a tumultuous year for the elected leaders of the 143,000-student system. Having discarded socioeconomic diversity as a factor in school assignment, as newly elected board members promised voters last fall, the school board now faces not only the federal investigation, but also a review by a national accrediting body.
The state and national NAACP alleged in complaints filed in September that the board engaged in racial bias by eliminating diversity in the assignment policy, through student reassignments made this year and in the way minority students are disproportionately suspended.

Read the entire article here.
 
Another Fine Post from: No 2 Religion - Just Say No!

Related articles

• Federal government to probe claims of racism against Wake schools - Source: News & Observer (curmilus.wordpress.com)
• Department of Education investigates civil rights complaints against CMS (charlotte.news14.com)
• Several School Districts Violating Civil Rights of English Language Learners (no2religion.blogspot.com)

Tenn. SBoE Is Looking For A Fight

John Thomas Scopes
Image by Smithsonian Institution via Flickr

What is it that these states do not get, particularly Tennessee. Did they not learn anything in 1926? No matter how many times the law has gone against SBoE's they keep coming back for more. You have to admire their persistence and their stupidity.

Tenn. OKs guidelines for teaching Bible

Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The state Board of Education has approved guidelines on how to teach the Bible in public high schools even though there’s concern the curriculum could be challenged in court.

The guidelines approved this week are in response to 2008 legislation, which authorized the state to create a course for a “nonsectarian, nonreligious academic study of the Bible.”

State officials said they tried to develop principles that are safe from legal challenge. But some say a state-approved Bible course could violate church and state separation, depending on who is teaching it.

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee responded to concerns about religious activities in state public schools by sending out its guide — Know Your Rights: Religion in Public Schools — to schools systems across the state.

Hedy Weinberg, the state’s ACLU director, told The Tennessean that the state seemed sensitive to concerns that the classes could be used to try to convert individuals. However, there are few details on how the classes will be run.

“Whether these classes are constitutional depends on who teaches them and how they are taught,” she said. “The devil is in the details.”

Board member Richard Ray voted in favor of the standards, but is concerned potential lawsuits could create a distraction for schools.

“We have so much that needs to be done to elevate our kids in math and science, the focus of education should be right there,” he said.

Kent Richards, Old Testament professor at Emory University and executive director of the Society for Biblical Literature, has spent five years developing guides for teaching the Bible in public schools. He worked with Tennessee on this course.

Richards and other state officials agree that the focus must shift to properly training educators who will teach the course.

“One of the important things is that teachers are teaching about the Bible and not professing some religion or professing that the Bible is the only road to take,” Richards said. “That’s what every school and every school attorney is concerned about: not crossing that line.”

The course — which will teach students about the content of the Bible and its historical context — is an elective, meaning high schools can choose whether to offer it to students as a social studies credit, and students can decide whether to take it.

Before the state-approved curriculum, school districts could develop and offer their own courses on the Bible, and some still do. State social studies specialist Brenda Ables said the legislation actually complicates the issue because it doesn’t require districts with existing Bible courses to convert to the state’s curriculum.

“We think we’ve gotten this curriculum written to meet all guidelines that would uphold court challenges,” she said. “Those schools who had their own curriculum and were already teaching it will continue to do so until somebody tells them they can’t.”

Is Science is Racist?

According to Berkeley High School, science is unfair to minorities. Apparently, minorities do not enroll in science as much as whites do. So, to better serve the minority students they want to cut science classes in favor of resources for struggling students.

While I believe it is important to help struggling students, I do not think cutting science or any core curriculum will serve the students in the long run.

Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs 

The proposal would trade labs seen as benefiting white students for resources to help struggling students.

By Eric Klein at East Bay Express

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.
Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

Science teachers were understandably horrified by the proposal. "The majority of the science department believes that this major policy decision affecting the entire student body, the faculty, and the community has been made without any notification, without a hearing," said Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of Berkeley High School's science department, at last week's school board meeting.
Sincular-Mertens, who has taught science at BHS for 24 years, said the possible cuts will impact her black students as well. She says there are twelve African-American males in her AP classes and that her four environmental science classes are 17.5 percent African American and 13.9 percent Latino. "As teachers, we are greatly saddened at the thought of losing the opportunity to help all of our students master the skills they need to find satisfaction and success in their education," she told the board.

The full plan to close the racial achievement gap by altering the structure of the high school is known as the High School Redesign. It will come before the Berkeley School Board as an information item at its January 13 meeting. Generally, such agenda items are passed without debate, but if the school board chooses to play a more direct role in the High School Redesign, it could bring the item back as an action item at a future meeting.

School district spokesman Mark Coplan directed inquiries about the redesign to Richard Ng, the principal's assistant at Berkeley High and member of the School Governance Council. Ng did not return repeated calls for comment.

I Was Embarassed and Ashamed but Now I'm Proud

As you may have noticed by now, education and keeping religion out of education is very important to me.

In my post on September 6th, Does Obama's Speech to Student Violate Constitutional Rights? I said,

"...every school and school district in my county are showing the speech with the encouragement of the superintendent and school boards."

Unfortunately, that turned out to be a bit premature. While watching the late news last night, something I rarely do but my wife fell asleep holding the remote, I learned that my daughters school district had called an emergency meeting for 7:45 AM this morning. Apparently, a few parents had called to voice their concern and one board trustee, Dr. David LaRue (also a parent), wrote a letter to the superintendent calling Obama's speech propaganda and compared it to George Orwell's Animal Farm. Dr. LaRue went on to personally threaten any teacher that showed the speech with a formal letter of complaint from himself and any parent he could find. He also accused the superintendent of overstepping her authority by allowing the speech in violation of California Ed Code and Board Policy. However, after review it was determined that California Ed Code was not violated and the Board Policy referenced only applied to pre-recorded video not live events.

There was about a hundred people in attendance and the majority of those who spoke, including my self, and applauded overwhelmingly wanted the speech shown. After a motion and comments by the board they voted 3-2 to allow the speech.

When I first heard about the meeting I was ashamed that my daughter's district had gone this way but I was proud of the civic action the district's parents took.

You can see the news story on the school board meeting here. BTW I'm sitting behind the guy with the flag but you don't get to see me.