Coming to a School near you...

[dnalexander]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/22search.html?_r=1&ref=us
This article was too long to post here, so theres the link

Tell me again why I send my children to public school?  The strip search was bad enough, but to even suggest that school officals have the authority to strip search a student should be criminal.  Schools officals do not have police powers or law enforcement expirence or the authority (yet) to do this.  Why wasn't the childs parents contacted prior to doing this?  I could be mistaken but that is a violation of law.  That child had no representive to act on her behalf.  All school officals involved in this should should be arrested for child abuse.  and made to register as sex offenders.  I think that if this happened to one of my kids, I would go to jail.

Court says strip search of Ariz. teenager illegal

By JESSE J. HOLLAND – 9 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a school's strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.

In an 8-1 ruling, the justices said school officials violated the law with their search of Savana Redding in the rural eastern Arizona town of Safford.

Redding, who now attends college, was 13 when officials at Safford Middle School ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear because they were looking for pills — the equivalent of two Advils. The district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the school was acting on a tip from another student.

"What was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear," Justice David Souter wrote in the majority opinion. "We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable."

In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas found the search legal and said the court previously had given school officials "considerable leeway" under the Fourth Amendment in school settings.

Officials had searched the girl's backpack and found nothing, Thomas said. "It was eminently reasonable to conclude the backpack was empty because Redding was secreting the pills in a place should thought no one would look," Thomas said.

Thomas warned that the majority's decision could backfire. "Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments," he said. "Nor will she be the last after today's decision, which announces the safest place to secrete contraband in school."

The court also ruled the officials cannot be held liable in a lawsuit for the search. Different judges around the nation have come to different conclusions about immunity for school officials in strip searches, which leads the Supreme Court to "counsel doubt that we were sufficiently clear in the prior statement of law," Souter said.

"We think these differences of opinion from our own are substantial enough to require immunity for the school officials in this case," Souter said.

The justices also said the lower courts would have to determine whether the Safford United School District No. 1 could be held liable.

A schoolmate had accused Redding, then an eighth-grade student, of giving her pills.

The school's vice principal, Kerry Wilson, took Redding to his office to search her backpack. When nothing was found, Redding was taken to a nurse's office where she says she was ordered to take off her shirt and pants. Redding said they then told her to move her bra to the side and to stretch her underwear waistband, exposing her breasts and pelvic area. No pills were found.

A federal magistrate dismissed a suit by Redding and her mother, April. An appeals panel agreed that the search didn't violate her rights. But last July, a full panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the search was "an invasion of constitutional rights" and that Wilson could be found personally liable.

Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented from the portion of the ruling saying that Wilson could not be held financially liable.

"Wilson's treatment of Redding was abusive and it was not reasonable for him to believe that the law permitted it," Ginsburg said.

The case is Safford Unified School District v. April Redding, 08-479.

Full Ruling at Supreme Court Website:

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/08-479.pdf

[Anmar]

Whatever, you guys are like so immature...


This is off topic i suppose but I found this list of books that have been banned in some public schools, do any of you know if that is the case for Elk schools:

1)  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2)  Catcher in the Rye
3)  To Kill a Mockingbird
4)  Bridge to Terabithia
5)  Lord of the Flies
6)  Of Mice and Men
7)  The Color Purple
8 )  The Harry Potter Series
9)  Slaughterhouse five
10) The Bluest Eye

I read the first 7 of those books when i was a kid.  3 of them were required reading in elementary and middle school.

[Catwoman]

I have never heard of books being banned in Kansas public school libraries...Has anyone else?  I have only heard of that type of lunacy going on elsewhere in the country.

[Varmit]

Not a complete list but here is a link that lists some of the books that have been banned, not just in ks.

http://www.banned-books.com/bblista-i.html

[kshillbillys]

I don't know about anyone else but after reading this list that Billy provided I want to track down 3 or 4 of these books and read them myself!!! Does that mean I'm bad? 

[kshillbillys]

I just bought "As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner off of eBay and can't wait to get it here!!

[Catwoman]

Wouldn't it be great if the general public went, en masse, to buy all the 'banned' books, in protest of those prudes who have imposed their belief system on others?  A very civil revolt...What a classic idea! 

[redcliffsw]

I'm thinking it would be best for the local public schools to retake their
schools from the state and Feds. 

Not to take anything away from the banned books, but it's a small issue.

[indygal]

One of our assignments in English 101 was to write an argument or satirical essay. I wrote the following in May '05. I feel I must repeat....it is satire!

Literary Censorship: How to Deliver Us from Evil
In this age of moral ambiguity, we should be comforted to know our lawmakers have the best interests of children in mind.  Protecting our young people is a noble and necessary cause, so we must do everything we can to ensure they receive a proper education and to limit their exposure to influences that could have a negative impact on their lives.  Our government is working hard to achieve these goals; however, we should insist they do more to eliminate any possibility of our children being corrupted by those whose beliefs and behaviors deviate from our moral code.

A case in point is a bill presented April 27, 2005, before the Alabama legislature.  If approved, this bill would have removed from public school libraries any book that was written by a homosexual or contains homosexual characters.  The bill also would have prohibited a school's use of federal funds to purchase such books.  The bill failed to pass, however, as an insufficient number of lawmakers attended that hearing (which, incidentally, happened to fall on the last day of the legislative session).  Earlier this year, a similar bill made it successfully through the Arkansas statehouse but met its demise in a tie vote by the state's senate education commission.  We can only hope the esteemed Alabama and Arkansas legislators were merely holding out for bills that would grant them a stronger moral authority, and that once those bills are presented they will be endorsed wholeheartedly.

Rep. Gerald Allen, who authored the failed bill in Alabama, told CBS News he believes gay people have a political agenda that must be stopped.  Had his bill been successful, high schools would have been required to remove books by Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Evelyn Waugh, Carson McCullers, Alice Walker and others who promote homosexuality in any way.  There is speculation that Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, A.E. Housman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Marcel Proust may fall into this category as well, so it is likely their works would be banned.

"It's not healthy for America, it doesn't fit what we stand for ... I don't look at (the bill) as censorship," Mr. Allen said.  "I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children."

In this respect, Rep. Allen's bill fell far short of the necessary measures we should be taking. This should not be a difficult task, as we already have the standard by which to measure our success: the Bible.  By using this single resource, we can determine what is appropriate for our children to learn. While it is true the Bible condemns homosexuality, the real issues facing our society are those found in The Ten Commandments.  To truly protect the pure hearts and impressionable minds of our young people, as Mr. Allen wishes to do, we must encourage our lawmakers to eliminate all literature that contains any reference to idolatry, murder, parental disrespect, adultery, theft, lying, and covetous behavior.

Despite being regarded as classic literature, all works by William Shakespeare must be destroyed immediately.  These stories are rife with characters who exhibit the most abhorrent of behaviors and violate every commandment: the murderous Hamlet and Macbeth, the conniving Iago, and the plotting daughters of King Lear (not to mention his own oedipal desires).  Romeo and Juliet set a dreadful example for youthful readers by willfully disrespecting their parents' wishes and by relying on knives and poison to solve their problems.

Modern literature also has a plethora of killers, liars, adulterers, and thieves.  Tom Joad, the protagonist in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, is a murderer, and stealing is a common occurrence throughout the novel.  Characters in A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, and The Three Musketeers, by Alexander Dumas, resort to killing off other s who prevent them from achieving their goals.  Consider the licentious nature of the characters in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, and Sophie's Choice, by William Styron, and we can agree these works must be incinerated.  If we wish to discourage our children from stealing, Dickens' Oliver Twist must go.  So must The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck, Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, and Silas Marner, by George Eliot, as each has theft as part of its story line.

One might argue that young people should be allowed to read The Telltale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe, and The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, since they describe the appropriate consequences of murder and adultery, respectively. On the other hand, children are clearly incapable of discerning right from wrong and may be tempted to imitate these vices.  By removing these stories from school libraries, we will prevent any chance of that happening.

Not only should we destroy books with explicit reference to sinful behavior, we should also eliminate other books by the same authors.  It is common practice that when one reads and enjoys one book, he or she is likely to seek out other titles by the same author. It is possible these books may contain inappropriate material; if they are no longer available, the danger of potential corruption is averted. We must not take any chances with our children's moral upbringing.

As long as we are banning books that conflict with our beliefs, we should remove those written by or about agnostics and atheists, as well as those written by people of different faiths.  Obviously, none of these authors have any regard for Christian ideology, so unless we wish to expose our children to religious viewpoints that contradict our own, we must eliminate that opportunity.  No longer would students be allowed to read material by Carl Sagan, Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, Thomas Paine, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzche, Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kahlil Gibran, Hermann Hesse or Thomas Huxley.  We probably should ban anything written by or about Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Clarence Darrow, and Stephen Hawking, just for good measure.

By now it should be obvious that the only book suitable for our children to read is the Bible.  Its writings, penned by those inspired by God, contain the only truth they need to learn.  Using scripture as the moral compass, we will guarantee the purity of education for generations to come.  Never again would our youngsters be exposed to the evils that permeate our culture.

Of course, if we were to apply the same aforementioned guidelines of morality, we may wish to remove the parts describing Cain's murder of his brother Abel and the deceptive and incestuous practices of Lot's daughters.  We also should give serious consideration to removing the story of the scheming, covetous and adulterous behavior of Batsheba and David, God's hand-picked king of Israel from whom Jesus was descended.  As we know, David redeemed himself in the eyes of God; however, our young people may not be so fortunate, so why run the risk of them emulating his behavior?  It seems even the Bible is not free of tempting influences, including those specifically cited as sins against God.  Perhaps we need to ban it as well.

Once the library shelves are completely empty – and English teachers are out of work – we can rest easy knowing our children are shielded from the ills of society.  Destroying books will guarantee they have no means with which to compare their beliefs with others, to discern the differences and similarities of their global family members, and to make decisions based on their own observations and experiences.  We will have given them the ultimate gift: the freedom of not having to think for themselves.  Then, and only then, will they be prepared to become leaders of the greatest nation on earth.

[redcliffsw]

Oh. so they made standards and evaluations for students who
move to another school or is it really for another reason(s)?   

The socialists have been working on standards at least since
the WBTS in the north and afterwards the northerners made
the Southerners do likewise.

The Soviets were not able to preserve their own "holy" socialist
system by & thru the schools. 

No telling how much more money the "O" man pumped
into education with his stimulus package.  More of the same
ole soup, just warmed over...