Public Teacher Harassed, Injured by Students; Says Administrators Ignored It

A high school teacher in North Carolina collapsed at work April 7, the final chapter in a story about bullying and threats that went unnoticed.

image courtesy WRAL

Roseann Monteleone told local media that one of her students put some kind of poison into her soda during school hours. The suspect claims it was nothing but hand soap put in there as a prank. Monteleone insists that the burn marks in her throat came from something stronger.

According to Monteleone, she’d become the target of personal bullying for a while. She claims a student drew a picture of a gun on her chalk board, and at one point she found a note which contained a written threat.

Complaints to her supervisors went nowhere. The bullying persisted until she was found unconscious in a bathroom on campus.

Monteleone claims that violent students are not confronted by administrators over fear of a lawsuit from angry parents.

I am not at all surprised that this happened in North Carolina. Anyone who has had dealings with the state system there will tell you it is one corrupt and incompetent place.

-Candance

Public School Priorities in California

The California state Senate voted Thursday on a bill that would require public schools to include open homosexuals in history curriculum.

Democrat Mark Leno sponsored the bill because, in his words, gay teenagers are “being harassed literally to death” in public school. He meant this in the context of depression-induced suicide, which progressives routinely exaggerate among gay teens.

So apparently the only way to stop gay kids from getting teased is for teachers to wedge in information about gay people in history. The bill will give local districts a lot of freedom as to how they go about doing this.

Because, of course, these teachers don’t have anything better to do with their time.

In 2009 the California Department of Education published its most recent account of school performance. It found that in a typical classroom there, some 48 percent of students were not proficient in English and 47 percent were not proficient in math. The statewide dropout average is 20 percent. Students who take the SAT score a dismal 501 on reading comprehension and a lackluster 516 on math.

But don’t worry. Their history teacher will tell them who Claude Raines is, and then all will be well.

Meanwhile, a Christian teen from El Cajon is fighting a lawsuit against his public school right now.  According to that student, teachers forcibly confiscated a Bible he’d brought to school and suspended him for discussing theology with his peers.

No word from Mark Leno if religious kids are being treated “like second class citizens.”

Religious groups have long been skeptical of anti-bullying campaigns from progressives. This is because – like many agendas pushed on the left – bullying laws don’t have a lot to do with bullying.

Making it illegal to bully someone in the traditional sense is pointless and redundant; schools already have uniform policies that punish acts of violence or gross verbal abuse. Progressives want to go beyond this definition and prohibit anything negative said toward homosexual lifestyles.

Religious students would be deemed bullies if they expressed an opinion that homosexuality was not natural. Students would be required to hear classroom instruction about lovable, perfectly normal gay people in history, and would not be allowed to object on religious grounds.

It’s obvious to anyone who pays attention that public schools have long given up the effort to teach math or science, and have simply become indoctrination camps for progressive ideology.

-Candance

Public Schools Recruit Smarter Immigrants to Pad School Performance

Pop quiz: what do you do when federal funding for your school is tied to performance, but the kids in your local community are too ignorant to perform?

A)    Dedicate yourself to making the local students smarter.

B)    Tell the federal government that NCLB is a joke.

C)    Travel to China, hobnob with wealthy parents, and convince them to send their kid to your high school with a vague promise it will get them into Harvard.

If you’re a typical superintendent in America, you will go with option C.

Yahoo! News has more via the Associated Press:

Next fall, Millinocket Superintendent Ken Smith hopes to have at least 60 Chinese students — each paying $13,000 in tuition and another $11,000 for room and board — at Stearns High School. Stearns at one time had close to 700 high school students, but enrollment has fallen over the years to under 200 this year […]

When Smith went on a recruiting trip to the cities of Shanghai, Beijing and Fuzhou last fall, students there had never heard of Maine. But they knew they wanted to come to America to enhance their chances of going to an American college or university.

No word on who paid for that recruiting trip. What, you expect AP to ask hard questions about something?

Meanwhile, the local students in Millinocket – whose parents do not have the resources or the freedom to send them elsewhere – are failing. Millinocket is a working class town of less than 6,000. Stearns High, a public school, performs woefully below the state average on student performance.

So the Asian kids show up, skate through the school year, and mark on their transcripts that they were valedictorian of their class. The school uses this to pad academic performance and secure more funding. The local kids, left to fail for so many years, now have no chance to graduate at the top of their class, meaning hard work would go completely unnoticed.

For basketball fans out there, this is equal to Michael Beasley playing for Kansas State because he knew he would be the star of the team.

Of course, none of that made it into the AP report. We have American children to discourage and destroy here. More than ever, it is becoming obvious that public education is harmful to your kids.

-Candance

 

Teachers’ Cutesy Chain Email Demonstrates Why the Public Hates Them

Advice to teachers’ union apologists: when you want to create public sympathy with a chain letter joke, it kind of works a little better if you hide your disdain for the taxpayers.

One of these chain letters made its way to facebook where your humble blogger happened to read it. It’s sad that these people are so far removed from reality that they think this actually makes them look good. Prepare yourself for government worker entitlement on parade:

Are you sick of high paid teachers? Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do – baby sit! We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan — that equals 6 1/2 hours).

Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children.

Now how many do they teach in day…maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day. However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

LET’S SEE…. That’s $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute — there’s something wrong here! There sure is!

The average teacher’s salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student–a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!)

A few things…

First, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people earning $50,000 a year these days. The average salary (nationwide) of a firefighter is $44,260. The average salary of a Staff Sargeant in the military is $34,088.  Police officers come in at $51,410.

Secondly, the estimation of 30 kids in class is ridiculous. Per the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2008 the average class size was 20 for elementary and 23 for high school.

Finally, looking at this from the parents’ perspective is even worse. Even if we go with the math we’ve been presented, teachers with a master’s degree or some other advanced training should earn $280,800 a year. That means each child’s share is $9,360. And since the average family has 2 children, that’s $18,720 for the parents to come up with.

Via the U.S. Census records, average household income in America is $49,777. Not only do these teachers get paid more than those they serve, it would take 38 percent of their income to pay what these teachers “deserve” to make.

If you’re going to waste my time with cutesy jokes, at least make sure they’re funny.

-Candance

Fresh Video Out of Wisconsin: Teens with Bullhorns Look Pretty Well Organized

The following video comes to us courtesy of a public school student who took this footage himself and posted it on YouTube.

You are watching a large crowd from Madison East High flood the Capital rotunda last Tuesday on the first day of protests. Some of these kids are as young as 14 and 15. An unidentified boy with a bullhorn seems to assume the role of leader as he charges to the front, encouraging them to decry “union busting.”

Also note the professionally printed signs and elaborate posters these kids are holding up. On Tuesday morning. The day this supposedly began. Yeah, that really looks like a gang of kids who “found out” that school was canceled and spontaneously chose to join their teachers.

Where are the parents in Wisconsin? Where is concern that these kids haven’t attended school for days?

And since we’ve learned that Organizing for America is behind this, can we now assert that Democrats are perfectly willing to manipulate children, keep them out of school, and shove political fireworks into their hands as a means of getting more bodies to show up at a protest?

You can bet your bottom dollar the Tea Party Express would be slapped with criminal charges if it closed public schools and gave a bullhorn to a gang of teenagers.

But as the old saying goes, what a difference with a (D).

-Candance

Wisconsin Democrats Leave Capital on Day of Vote, Protests Rage

Update at bottom: location of missing confirmed

As part of our continuing coverage of the teacher strike in Wisconsin, today we report that State Senate Democrats, fearing punishment from their union ATM machines supporters , have completely skipped out on their jobs as well.

Today is supposed to be the day the state legislature votes to pass Governor Walker’s new budget. Last year’s election-day tidal wave gave Republicans enough seats in that body to essentially pass whatever they want. Rumors leaked last night that Walker had secured enough Republican votes to assure his budget would pass.

Even so, it is necessary for the entire body to be present for such a major vote. At 11:30 Thursday morning when it became obvious the Democrats weren’t coming, the majority leader called on police to round up the missing lawmakers and escort them to the chamber. Failure to show up for this kind of vote counts as refusing to do their job and allows for police to aggressively recommend they come in.

While these Democrats cannot stop the vote from going against them, they can apparently stall the process by forcing Republicans to wait for police to round them up. Your humble blogger suspects a more serious motive: stalling the vote for another day or two would give the union time to grow a more drastic protest.

When the teachers in Madison compared themselves to Cairo, it would be wise to assume they weren’t kidding.

The biggest joke to emerge from this so far came from one teacher who bemoaned the lack of a “democratic process” being respected by state of Wisconsin. Yes they know there was an election less than six months ago which gave Walker a clear mandate – but no one actually thinks election results matter.

See, this is what you have to understand about progressives. When their side loses through democratic means, the simply pretend the election never happened and work to sabotage reform. When their side gets a victory, it’s called a democratic mandate.

And to think, liberals mocked certain people for predicting massive waves of civil unrest would land on American soil.

At what point will independents realize this train has a predetermined destination?

-Candance

Update (6:30pm) – According to local media, the Democrats banded together and took a bus into Illinois. They are staying at a resort. Wisconsin police don’t have the jurisdiction to leave the state, Illinois police won’t deport them, and President Obama won’t do a darn thing.

If Republicans did a stunt like this you can guarantee the media would be hyperventilating.