Category: Education & Schools

Teachers With Guns: District by District, a Push to Arm Educators Is Growing
Seconds matter during a school shooting. A rural superintendent wondered, what if staff members could intervene before police arrived?

An act of mass violence hasn’t yet touched the Benjamin Logan Local School District.

Superintendent John Scheu is thankful for that.

But for years, every time news broke about yet another school shooting, Scheu faced a handful of “what if?” questions.

What if a school in this small, rural district about an hour northwest of Columbus, Ohio—where the closest police outpost is 10 miles away—was the next target of a shooting? What if Benjamin Logan students were the next to have to huddle in closets sending “I love you” texts to friends and family? What if Scheu’s community was the next to have to mourn the loss of beloved students and staff members?

“If it can happen in all of these other places, it could happen here,” he said.

So, Scheu and his district invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in security. They hired school resource officers who are stationed at each of the district’s three schools. Security cameras send live feeds to the local sheriff’s office. Staff are reminded often that exterior doors are not to be propped open or left unlocked for any reason.

There’s a new mental health clinic at one of the schools, staffed with counselors trained to help the district’s roughly 1,600 students and 225 staff members.

District leaders felt confident they’d done all they could to keep outside threats from entering their buildings.

But what if the threat came from someone already inside?

Students and teachers have lockdown drills, and, as has become commonplace in American schools, they know to pull down the shades and lock the classroom doors before hiding quietly from a threat. But, beyond that, there isn’t much they would be able to do but “wait and hope that help would come,” Scheu said.

Except, Scheu asked himself, what if there were staff members trained to intervene? What if a handful of teachers, aides, and others could quickly reach for a firearm if an active shooter were targeting students?

“When you’re talking about putting out an active shooter threat, it’s a matter of seconds, not a matter of minutes,” said Scheu, who has served as superintendent in the district since July 2020. “And it’s a matter of life and death.”

After a year of planning, the district’s first “Armed Response Team” was in place to start the 2023-24 school year, part of a growing trend in Ohio and elsewhere in which schools tap teachers and other employees to act as the first line of armed defense against an active shooter.

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If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.

Vanderbilt professor: Climate change stories ‘cater to the white consciousness.’

A professor of English at Vanderbilt University recently gave a talk about how the genre of climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” has a problem with “its intersection [of] race and genre.”

Teresa Goddu  whose advocacy led to the creation of Vanderbilt’s Environmental and Sustainability Studies minor, told an audience at the Novel Seminar Series that climate fiction in the United States “depicts the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis,” The Hustler reports.

Such stories “often represent white, mostly privileged characters in communities becoming destabilized if not undone by climate catastrophe,” Goddu said. “Climate punctures the bubble of safety and security that cocoons the white psyche.”

Goddu added that she is “tired” of the focus on whiteness in climate stories, or “texts that actually just reify whiteness.” As a result, she’s working on “encompassing slave and neo-slave narratives” into such tales to “expand the canon.”

“I really think a lot of climate fiction is being written, but not recognized as such, especially African American literature,” Goddu said. “I want to expand […] what is considered climate fiction and [redefine] what we are actually reading and paying attention to.”

Looking ahead, Goddu said she hopes her work will expand the genre and leverage optimism, satire and new tropes to innovate the body of work and reimagine a better, more sustainable future.

“I am more interested in reading stories that reimagine possible futures or teach me about the structures, historically and currently, that I live within,” Goddu said. “I don’t like literature as policy statements. I don’t like literature to be so instrumental.”

According to her faculty bio, Goddu’s research deals with “slavery and antislavery, race and American culture [and] genre studies.” In a 2021 interview, Goddu said she began “noticing how the antislavery movement was being invoked by climate activists as a model.”

“This led me to consider what social change my own moment demanded of me and how I might bring my gifts—as administrator, teacher, and writer—to bear on the issue,” she said. “It made sense to connect my long-standing concern with racial justice to the issue of climate justice and my interest in how literature can affect social change to the climate crisis.”

Seven years ago another Vanderbilt academic, Ed Rubin, offered a pair of courses on cli-fi: “Visions of the Future in Cli-Fi” and “Climate Change Literature: A New Fictional Genre about a Real Problem.” Many of the titles on his reading list (“Earth Abides,” “The Postman,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) are Euro/white-centric.

Academic Whose Work Was Cited As Proof Of ‘Systemic Racism’ Is Fired For Falsifying Research.

A Florida State University professor whose work was foundational to perpetuating the false narrative that there is widespread “systemic racism” infecting American society has been fired for falsifying data in his academic research on the subject.

In a recently resurfaced report from last month, the New York Post revealed that Eric Stewart, an FSU criminology professor, had been fired by the university “on account of ‘extreme negligence’ in his research,” as well as “incompetence” and producing “false results” in his nearly 20 years of work.

“I do not see how you can teach our students to be ethical researchers or how the results of future research projects conducted by you could be deemed as trustworthy,” FSU Provost James Clark wrote in a July 13 letter formally notifying Stewart of his firing.

According to the Post, Stewart has had six studies published in major academic journals between 2003 and 2019 that were “fully retracted,” including a 2019 study claiming the historical legacy of lynchings “made whites perceive blacks as criminals, and that the problem was worse among conservatives.”

Stewart’s retracted research also included claims that racial disparities in criminal sentencing are racially motivated. In a 2015 study, for instance, Stewart suggested Americans supported tougher sentencing for Hispanics because they feared an increase in the U.S. Latino population and Latinos’ potential economic success.

Other retracted studies include a 2018 analysis which “suggested that white Americans view black and Latino people as ‘criminal threats,’ and suggested that perceived threat could lead to ‘state-sponsored social control,’” the Post added.

Clark indicated in his letter that Stewart’s other published works are “in doubt.”

Rather than own up to his actions, Stewart has since attempted to play the victim card and attacked Justin Pickett, a former FSU graduate student who reported Stewart for his unethical conduct. Following the launch of the investigation into his work in 2020, Stewart, who is black, claimed that by raising concerns about his faulty research, Pickett had “essentially lynched [him] and [his] academic character.”

In addition to his $190,000 annual salary at FSU, Stewart’s projects received millions in research grants from major groups and government agencies. According to the Post, the National Institute of Mental Health — which falls under the National Institute of Health — reportedly gave Stewart $3.2 million to research “how African Americans transition into adulthood.”

Stewart also reportedly received funds from the National Science Foundation, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, and the National Institute of Justice, a subsidiary of the Department of Justice.

The discovery of Stewart’s falsified research and his subsequent firing is significant to understanding the left’s ongoing war on American police officers. As noted by Wilfred Reilly, an associate professor at Kentucky State University, Stewart is “[p]robably THE academic [figure] responsible” for the debunked narrative that so-called “systemic racism” plagues U.S. police departments throughout the country.

According to Google Scholar, for instance, Stewart’s questionable — and in several cases, categorically false — works have garnered more than 8,500 citations by other researchers. Stewart’s “research” has been used as a pretext by other academics, regime-approved media, and Democrat politicians to smear America’s on-the-ground law enforcement officers as inherently “racist” towards non-white Americans.

“The point [of this story] is that one of the [main] guys who built up the entire narrative of ‘wokeness’ just made it up,” Reilly told The Federalist. “Throughout the entire kind of racial reckoning, one of the things that I and others … have noticed is that these stories [about police brutality against black Americans] keep collapsing. The narrative of police genocide of African Americans turned out … to be complete nonsense.”

Reilly also referenced research conducted by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, whose analyses of publicly available data have debunked leftists’ narrative that there is an epidemic of police killing unarmed black Americans. In a USA Today article published a few months after George Floyd’s death, for instance, Mac Donald noted how even data from The Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings dispels such claims and predicted that “[r]educing police resources will ultimately result in poorer service to the law-abiding residents of high-crime areas.”

Mac Donald’s forecast ultimately came true. While the rise of Black Lives Matter and Democrat-generated attacks on police began under the Obama administration, it was Floyd’s death that ushered in a new era of the left’s war on America’s police. Democrat politicos and their legacy media allies quickly hijacked Floyd’s death to normalize street violence committed by their communist foot soldiers.

The left’s perpetuation of the false “systemic racism in policing” narrative and their subsequent actions not only killed people such as David Dorn, but countless others who suffered because their Democrat-run cities defunded local law enforcement.

Following Floyd’s death and the anti-police back it launched, there was a significant spike in overall murders, especially affecting black victims. According to Reilly, such statistics don’t interest groups like Black Lives Matter because “a focus on things that might actually correlate with a high loss of black life … [is] not what the movement was about.”

BLM “was about using outlier conflict between blacks and whites to get money,” Reilly said. “The whole idea was to take these very isolated, white cop or white vigilantes on black male cases and present them as normal. They did that for a while. It turned out not to be real and they’ve pulled back from the scene, now as the owners of some nice properties. And now we’re left to clean up the mess.”

Quote O’ The Day
If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war. – Glenn T. Seaborg

Math professors: Incoming students can’t even add fractions, subtract

Colleges add tutoring, remedial courses as freshmen struggle post-COVID lockdowns

Universities across the country are struggling to address incoming students’ poor math skills after many fell behind academically during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

More than ever before, professors say freshmen cannot answer basic high school mathematics problems such as subtracting a positive number from a negative number or adding two fractions, according to a recent report from the Associated Press.

“We’re talking about college-level pre-calculus and calculus classes, and students cannot even add one-half and one-third,” Maria Emelianenko, chair of the George Mason University math department, told the Associated Press.

Emelianenko said new students’ math deficiencies have become such a “huge issue” that her northern Virginia university recently began a Math Boot Camp, and approximately 100 students chose to attend the week-long remedial program over the summer.

Other colleges and universities are seeing the same problem. Many first-year college students spent their 10th grade year – when algebra or geometry is typically taught – at home due to widespread, months-long lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools switched to virtual classrooms instead, but growing research indicates many students struggled with online learning and now lag behind academically.

At Temple University in Philadelphia, Professor Jessica Babcock told the AP she began noticing the problem last year when grading STEM major students’ tests in her intermediate algebra course:

The quiz, a softball at the start of the fall semester, asked students to subtract eight from negative six.

“I graded a whole bunch of papers in a row. No two papers had the same answer, and none of them were correct,” she said. “It was a striking moment of, like, wow — this is significant and deep.”

Before the pandemic, about 800 students per semester were placed into that class, the equivalent of ninth grade math. By 2021, it swelled to nearly 1,400.

“It’s not just that they’re unprepared, they’re almost damaged,” said Brian Rider, Temple’s math chair. “I hate to use that term, but they’re so behind.”

Many universities are trying to be proactive, offering remedial summer programs, expanding tutoring services and providing more office hours with professors, according to AP. Math professors say they are thinking about new ways to teach the subject, too, including more hands-on, in-class instruction.

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Comment O’ The Day
Let’s call this what it is: The sex groomer Stasi.

BLUF
Make no mistake: This bill does involve training teachers to profile parents based on the likelihood that they may secretly harbor heresy against the transgender state religion

California Bills Headed to Newsom’s Desk Will Launch a Transgender Inquisition Targeting Parents.

“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children” might as well become the new slogan of the Golden State.

California’s Legislature has passed—or is about to pass—a slew of bills aimed at undermining the rights of parents (and potential foster parents) who disagree with the transgender worldview.

What would the state need to launch a transgender inquisition? It would need inquisitors to identify and hunt down parents who dared to dissent from gender ideology. It would need an apparatus to induct kids into its cult while keeping parents in the dark. It would need institutions to screen potential foster parents to block heretics from fostering or adopting kids who might convert to the state religion. Most importantly, it would need a legal way to pry kids from the arms of their apostate progenitors.

These legislative proposals foot that bill. One of them would train teachers to profile these hated “anti-LGBTQ” parents, another would train psychotherapists to prepare to hide gender “treatments” from parents at a minor’s request, a third would prevent school districts from removing sexually explicit books if they contain transgender themes, a fourth would prevent Californians from becoming foster parents if they dissent from gender ideology, and the fifth would expand the definition of child abuse to include “non-affirmation” of a child’s claimed transgender identity.

In a supreme Orwellian irony, each of these California bills claims to uphold the virtues of “diversity” and “inclusion,” while forcing down parents’ throats a constricting worldview at odds with reality and seeking to exclude moms and dads from raising their own children if they dare to disagree.

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Need more than one (1).

In Wake of Uvalde, Recently Passed Texas Statewide Mandate Means an Armed Security Officer in Every School

Texas lawmakers quietly passed a sweeping mandate for school safety measures, including a requirement to post an armed security officer at every school and provide mental health training for certain district employees.

Texas House Bill 3, which was signed into law June 14 by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, went into effect on Sept. 1, and comes in the wake of the horrific Uvalde school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in May 2022.

In the bill, each school district campus is required to armed security guard which includes: a school district peace officer; a school resource officer; a commissioned peace officer employee; a school marshal; or a school district employee who has completed school safety training and carries a handgun on their person on school premises.

HB00003I

 

Chicago Teachers Union president sends son to private school after labeling school choice supporters ‘fascists.’

Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, labeled private schools as ‘segregation academies’ in 2018. Last month she called those who supported school choice ‘fascists’. She enrolled her son in private school this month.

Here’s your mirror, Stacy. What changed? It turns out the public schools in her neighborhood are craptastic. She still sends her two daughters to a public elementary school. Perhaps they don’t have dreams of being athletes. It turns out that she was “forced” to send her son to private school. She’s all about the victimization of raising “a black boy” in America, you see.

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MEET THE NEW PRINCIPAL OF JOHN GLENN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Shantel Mandlay Facebook drag queen principal

Fox News reports that the Western Heights School District in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, has installed a drag queen as principal of the John Glenn Elementary School. Fox has confirmed that the new hire, Shane Murnan, is “a drag queen who goes by the name of Shantel Mandalay.” Although Mandalay’s Facebook account has since been deleted, the article provides screenshots of him in his full drag glory.

According to Fox, Murnan was employed as a drag queen at a venue called “The Boom.”

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Students are entering college unable to write.

K-12 public education has failed to prepare incoming college students how to write at the public level.

In a desperate attempt to catch high school graduates up to speed, many universities are providing remedial writing classes to college students.

About 68% of those starting at two-year public institutions and 40% of students enrolled in public four-year universities took at least one remedial writing class between 2003 to 2009, according to an original report from the Department of Education.

Average math and reading test scores dropped significantly from 2019 to 2021, according to a 2022 study by two Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA). It seems likely that the 2016 figures would be much worse if they were resampled in 2023, after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Megan Kuhfeld, one of three NWEA study researchers, told Campus Reform Aug. 30 that “It seems likely but with two caveats: (a) the students in our study have not reached college yet so it is hard to extrapolate from middle school test results and (b) colleges may have changed their criteria for routing students into remedial courses as a results of the pandemic, which would also change the proportion.”

The remediation statistics from the NWEA study indicate that many incoming and current college students are not prepared for university-level coursework. As such, numerous institutions are offering remedial writing courses aimed at preparing incoming freshmen on how to write at the college level.

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Back to *Home* School: 5 Lessons I’ve Learned

It’s back to school time, and for some of us that means back to home school.

In recent years homeschooling has enjoyed a fairly well-publicized upswing. But the surge in interest has also sparked some narrow-minded backlash. Like the other areas I cover, education suffers from plenty of groupthink.

My family of three is a homeschool family. My wife and I have one child, an eight-year-old son, and having an “only” makes homeschooling sometimes harder and sometimes easier. We live in an area where homeschooling is quite common, and being part of a larger community has been very helpful.

We experimented with four different types of more traditional schooling and exposed ourselves to an array of less conventional models. After some back-and-forth between schooling and homeschooling (courtesy of California’s lockdowns), we settled on homeschooling as the best fit for our son. As much as we tout it, we’re not dogmatic. If we come across something better, we’ll switch.

We’ve been lucky that the vast majority of our friends and family support our decision to homeschool. In general, the better they know us, the more supportive they are. That’s because they see that it’s working for our son.

But we’ve also experienced some rather bewildered reactions. Such reactions typically come from people who have experienced nothing but traditional schooling. One person asked if our son had any friends, but nobody who knows him well would ask that. Although many worry that homeschooling hampers socialization, our experience has been quite the opposite.

Maybe I’ll address socialization at some point, but for now I’ve focused on five lessons my family has learned from our experience with homeschooling.

I wanted to avoid more common topics (like why a family might choose homeschooling in the first place) in order to focus on some lessons that might be rather hidden at the beginning of one’s homeschooling journey. Continue reading “”

ANALYSIS: Academics think a 4-year degree is everything, employers disagree
Employers want employees with well-honed soft skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, and teamwork, but graduates reportedly lack proficiency in these areas.

Nine out of 10 higher education professionals are convinced that their institutions are churning out job-ready warriors. But employers, current students, and recent grads beg to differ.

Higher education’s career-preparation efforts are not exactly hitting the bullseye, according to a recent Grammarly for Education and Higher Ed Dive report.

Citing surveys conducted by the Cengage Group and College Pulse, the collaborative report states that a mere 41% of recent graduates believe that their college degree effectively signals to employers that they possess the much-needed skills. Current students are also adding their voices to the chorus of concern, with a paltry 14% expressing satisfaction with the assistance provided by their campus career centers.

Employers are not pleased either.

The cries from the job market echo a desire for employees with well-honed soft skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, and teamwork, but graduates reportedly lacked proficiency in these areas.

Pointing to Gallup, the report cites that “Only 11% of business leaders said they believed college graduates were well prepared for the workforce.”

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Very, I’d say.

Gadsden flag: How ignorant are the folks running the schools?

Animated Flags - Bandiere animate pagina U-03

One of the biggest takeaways from the viral Colorado story of the school booting a 12-year-old out of class for having a Gadsden flag patch on his backpack is that the folks in charge are ignorant not just of free-speech basics, but fundamentals of US history.

How can they teach when they’re wrong about simple facts?

A top administrator at the Vanguard charter school is on tape lecturing that the flag has “slavery and the slave trade” origins, making the palm-sized patch was “disruptive to the classroom environment.”

A 10-second Google reveals the truth; the flag’s not about slavery at all.

Known for its rattlesnake and “Don’t tread on me” slogan, it originated during the American Revolution — a topic the school spends a year on in history class.

Remarkably, young Jaiden Rodriguez’s teacher toed the administration line in pulling him out of the classroom. That is, she supported ignorance, not her student being victimized by it.

The school’s fallback was to retroactively make an issue of his many semiautomatic-gun patches on the same backpack; they’re gone, and he’s back in class.

Known for its rattlesnake and “Don’t tread on me” slogan, the flag originated during the American Revolution.

And Vanguard has eaten its words on the flag (wise, as even Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat called out the mistake).

So far, though, it hasn’t explained its institutional idiocy. Chances are it’s intentional. Progressives have been pushing a distorted view of American history for years, demonizing everything from the National Anthem to the flag to the Constitution. To them, the truth doesn’t matter.

California bill would make questioning school board members a crime

California is poised to codify at the state level what the feds were once requested to do — that is, turn inquisitive parents into criminals for daring to question their school board representatives.

Senate Bill 596, introduced by Democratic State Senator Anthony Portantino in February and dubbed the “School Employees: Protection” act, expands an existing law “which makes it a misdemeanor for any ‘person’ to threaten or harass a school employee during the ‘course of [their] duties,’” according to the California Globe.

This expansion adds a penalty for creating a “substantial disorder” at any meeting of a public school board, charter school board, county board of education, and the California State Board of Education.

Although “substantial disorder” is not precisely defined, the bill notes that “course of conduct” is “a pattern of conduct composed of two or more acts over a period of time, however short … evidencing a continuity of purpose.”

Gone from the definition of “harassment” is “unlawful violence” and “credible threat of violence,” and in its place is “torments, or terrorizes.”

It’s not difficult to figure out what’s happening here. A concerned parent at a school board meeting asks a board member a question and reiterates it (thereby establishing a “course of conduct”) … and if the board member feels “tormented” the parent can be arrested and charged with a fine between $500 and $1,000 and face up to a year in jail.

Or, as the Globe’s Kenny Snell (a retired longtime teacher) put it, “In California-speak, that means school boards get to decide what is substantial and what is not; what is harassment and what is not. In Totalitarian-speak that means don’t dare even think about going to a school board meeting and question their narrative or policies.”

Keep in mind that last year the National School Boards Association — in collaboration with the Biden administration — wanted the U.S. Department of Justice to label outspoken parents “domestic terrorists” and the National Guard to monitor school board meetings.

The NSBA had complained of “acts of malice” and “aggression” by parents — eerily similar to the California bill’s “torments.”

Two other pieces of concerning legislation in the Golden State noted by the California Policy Center include Corey Jackson’s (D) Assembly Bill 1078 and Mia Bonta’s Assembly Bill 1352.

The former would give local school boards’ power to make curriculum decisions to education bureaucrats in the state capital, while the latter “would allow a duly elected school board member to be removed from office if he or she disagrees with the votes of teachers union-backed board members.”

Armed Staff Versus School Resource Officers- The Quality of Quantity to Defend Our Students

You must be present to win. That trite phrase might apply to the local bake sale. It certainly applies to protecting our students at school. It is too easy for school boards and school principals to say they did something when they certainly did not do enough. We can agree that protecting our students is inherently a difficult problem. We are trying to stop evil narcissists who want to become celebrities by killing our kids. Formulaic answers don’t work for long because these murderers learn and adapt. The actions that protected our children yesterday might not work tomorrow. There are better solutions today and we need to recognize them.

The threat is changing over time. Greg Ellifritz did an excellent job looking at armed attacks at schools after the Covid lockdown. Only 20-percent of the attacks are now in the classroom. That means we need to do more than lock the classroom doors. Half of the armed attacks on our schools occurred before or after school when students were out of the classroom and on school grounds or on their way to school. That number is increasing, and that means that a single School Resource Officer at school for a few hours a week isn’t enough. Murderers might be adapting to the security measures that schools have already put in place like locked doors, metal detectors, and revised policies when someone pulls a fire alarm or triggers a smoke detector. We have to adapt as well.

We are changing every day. Schools are embedded in our society. Every problem we have in our culture eventually comes to school. We’ve heard calls to defund the police. Some urban administrators removed police officer on campus since they neither wanted to report nor wanted to file a complaint against the students committing crimes at school. As you’d imagine, more innocent students are victimized by violent crime when crime is tolerated at school. The social justice movements that removed School Resource Officers left students vulnerable to both common criminals and to celebrity-seeking murderers who search for easy victims.

Administrators prefer visible solutions. It is hard for school administrators to get public credit for solutions that the public can’t see. The parents seldom notice the reinforced glass in the windows and doors. In contrast, the parents can’t miss seeing the uniformed police officer standing in the parking lot when children are dropped off.

Unfortunately, public visibility works both for us and it works against us as we try to protect our children. A visible deterrent like an SRO helps stop low-level threats. The drug dealers move across the street and out of the school parking lot. The visible School Resource Officer is equally easy for a murderer to locate. The attacker can wait until the SRO either drives his police car away from campus, or the murderer can shoot the SRO first. We’ve seen both happen when schools were attacked.

Any single defender has a fatal flaw. There is an obvious reason that one adult can’t supervise an entire campus. They can’t be everywhere at the same time. The School Resource Officer can’t be up on the ball field when they are down in the parking lot. They can’t be behind the gymnasium if they are in the central courtyard. A midsized school might have half-a-dozen hallways and an equal number of separate buildings. That means a single defender is probably minutes away from an attack. That delay leads to more dead children.

The solution is obvious, if invisible. The researchers who study school security told us what to do over a decade ago. Murderers stop killing our kids when they face an armed defender. The defender’s response time predicts the body count. The SRO can’t be on the bus before school and on the bus after school, but the bus driver can. The SRO isn’t at the choir practice before school, but the choir director is there. After school, the SRO can’t be at the ball field and in the music room at the same time, but the coaches and band director are certainly there.

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Nipping gun ownership in the bud: Dept of Education’s outrageous moves

It is the job of the Congress to write airtight, unambiguous legislation that allows no opportunity for Executive or Judicial mischief. That’s a tough task to begin with, but an overambitious Executive or Judicial branch can stretch and mangle those words beyond ridicule to do whatever they want. It doesn’t help that the job keeps getting harder with time as long-agreed upon words are intentionally rejiggered to lose their meaning.

The latest example of Executive Overreach is the “reimagining” of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), a gun control law that was passed by government to compensate for the failure of government and placate the insatiable appetites of abusive gun controllers. Fox News reports (archived links):

Biden admin withholding key funding for schools with hunting, archery programs

EXCLUSIVE: The Biden administration is blocking key federal funding earmarked under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 for schools with hunting and archery programs.

According to federal guidance circulated among hunting education groups and shared with Fox News Digital, the Department of Education determined that, under the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) passed last year, school hunting and archery classes are precluded from receiving federal funding. The interpretation could impact millions of American children enrolled in such programs.

“It’s a negative for children. As a former educator of 30-plus years, I was always trying to find a way to engage students,” Tommy Floyd, the president of the National Archery in the Schools Program, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “In many communities, it’s a shooting sport, and the skills from shooting sports, that help young people grow to be responsible adults. They also benefit from relationships with role models.”[…]

According to Floyd, his organization boasts 1.3 million students from nearly 9,000 schools across 49 states who are enrolled in archery courses. Some of those schools have already canceled plans to include archery or hunting education courses in their curriculum due to the Education Department guidance.

Why oh why would the Federal Department of Education target hunting and archery in schools? It’s perhaps a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a puzzle to some, but it’s obvious to me that the DoE is trying to nip gun ownership in the bud by choking off exposure and interest in the next generation. Gun controllers are playing a long game, and this is a move to advance their disarmament agenda.

The legislation included an amendment to an ESEA subsection listing prohibited uses for federal school funding. That amendment prohibits ESEA funds from helping provide any person with a dangerous weapon or to provide “training in the use of a dangerous weapon.”

I looked up the text of the law and this is what it says:

Subtitle D–Amendment on ESEA Funding

SEC. 13401. AMENDMENT ON ESEA FUNDING.
Section 8526 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965

(20 U.S.C. 7906) is amended–
(1) in paragraph (5), by striking “or” after the
semicolon;
(2) in paragraph (6), by striking the period at the end and</sp
inserting “; or”; and
(3) by adding at the end the following:
“(7) for the provision to any person of a dangerous weapon,
 as defined in section 930(g)(2) of title 18, United States Code, 
 or training in the use of a dangerous weapon.”.

I can see how this amendment could be stretched to construe the prohibition of funding for archery and hunting programs.

However, in a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona earlier this month, Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., expressed concern that the agency is misinterpreting the provision which they said was included in the BSCA last year to withhold education funds for programs training school resource officers, not for hunting and archery classes. School resource officer training was funded under a separate provision.

“We were alarmed to learn recently that the Department of Education has misinterpreted the BCSA to require the defending of certain longstanding educational and enrichment programs — specifically, archery and hunter education classes — for thousands of children, who rely on these programs to develop life skills, learn firearm safety and build self-esteem,” Cornyn and Tillis wrote to Cardona.

“The Department mistakenly believes that the BSCA precludes funding these enrichment programs,” they continued. “Such an interpretation contradicts congressional intent and the text of the BSCA.”

Senators Cornyn, Tillis, and every self-proclaimed Second Amendment supporting elected official have some serious explaining to do to their voters. This language slipped under the radar and is now rearing its head. Gun control-supporting apparatchiks at the DoE are taking advantage of it because the text did not explicitly state that such training programs are exempt.

Overall, the ESEA is the primary source of federal aid for elementary and secondary education across the country, according to the Congressional Research Service. The BSCA earmarked an additional $1 billion for educational activities under the ESEA.

Personally, I want to see a complete and permanent separation of School and State and the Department of Education eliminated. But that’s not happening anytime soon.

With so much money at stake, this was a legislative fumble to put it mildly. Let’s see what the Biden DoE does next.

Signs Show Staff is Armed Go Up In Texas School

In Groesbeck, Texas (about a third of the way between Dallas and Houston), the Independent School District (ISD) has had a school guardian program in place for nearly a year. On July 17, 2023, the Groesbeck ISD issued a press release showing they had placed signs announcing the program. The Guardian program is a popular Texas program to enable local schools to have various members of their staff trained and armed, in order to respond to deadly threats in the school before police can arrive on the scene. The program is much more efficient than having School Resource Officers (certified police officers) assigned to the school. One SRO costs about $100,000 per year. A Guardian costs about $1,000 a year. A school district can afford 100 Guardians for the cost of one SRO. The Groesbeck School Superintendent, Anthony Figueroa, has embraced the program. From the Groesbeck Independent School District press release:

Two months ago, I sent my monthly superintendent newsletter informing parents of our Guardian Program and new signage (see picture below). Being installed this week, signs will be posted on our campuses which state, “ATTENTION: GISD STAFF ARE ARMED AND TRAINED TO PROTECT OUR STUDENTS.”12”X12” signs will be attached to all building entrances, and larger 3’X3’ signs will be displayed at all parking/drive way entrances.

Last year the Groesbeck ISD school board watched the devastation of schools across the country, being forced to prepare for the unthinkable –the potential of a school shooting, and considered appropriate policies. The Board updated local policy, authorizing a School Safety “Guardian” Program (TX Govt. Code 411.1901). Its purpose is to provide students and faculties an armed self-defense option prior to the arrival of Law Enforcement in the event of an active shooter or “active killer” on campus.

The Guardians are ISD staff members who have passed strict requirements and training. In order to protect them from becoming targets of an intruder, their names are confidential and are not to be released. I ask that names not be guessed at nor rumors passed in an attempt to protect these individuals.

Although the program has been in place for almost a year, the Board of Trustees approved for the district to make the program more visible. By providing the community this information and by placing signs up across the campuses, we are taking additional steps so that people know we are NOT an “easy target”.

Superintendent of Schools Anthony Figueroa noted the last three school districts in which he was involved were all participants in the Guardian program. This says something about Texas and, perhaps, about Anthony Figueroa.

From the Groesbeckjournal.com:

“I am proud to have been part of a Guardian program in my last three districts and I am proud that GISD had this program when I arrived,” said Figueroa. “My responsibility is to ensure we properly train our Guardians and that we properly communicate this program to our community.”

As of October 2022, about 450 out of 1022 school districts in Texas were involved in the Guardian program. As of this writing, no school district involved in the Guardian program has been the subject of a mass killing in school.

Placing the signs prominently on the doors and entrances to the campuses is a proactive step to stop mass killers from targeting schools. One of the chief drivers of these killers is the desire for fame, achieved by a high body count. Unknown armed protectors make planning to achieve a high body count difficult. Most of the killing in these events occurs in the first few minutes. Seconds of response time means lives. Having armed responders inside the situation as it occurs is the fastest way to stop the killers and save lives.