CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WTAP) – West Virginia lawmakers are considering a bill that would allow veterans and some retired law enforcement officers to provide armed security in public schools.
The West Virginia Senate passed Senate Bill 143, creating the West Virginia Guardian Program, on Friday.
The bill allows county boards of education in West Virginia to contract with honorably discharged veterans, former state troopers, former sheriff’s deputies, or former federal law enforcement officers to provide public safety and security on public school grounds and buildings.
The bill would not grant arrest authority to WV Guardians but would allow them to carry concealed weapons on school property.
Lead Sponsor Senator Eric Tarr (R – Putnam, Dist. 4) said the bill was informed by conversations with veterans. “This was brought to me by some retired military individuals who were in special forces and had concerns over school shootings that are happening across the country and said that we need people in our schools who are trained to run at a gun in an instant when it’s necessary,” Tarr said.
The bill was introduced last year, when it passed the senate but did not become law. SB 143 will now be considered by the House of Delegates.
“The staff who have been selected and trained will remain anonymous, and with God’s help this layer of protection will never need to be deployed. We expect no changes to the day to day experiences of students and staff,” the superintendent of Siouxland Christian School, located in Sioux City, Lindsay Laurich said in a letter to the school community last week, which was provided to Fox News Digital.
The school is not detailing how many staff members will be armed while on campus, or their identities, “in order to protect the staff who are taking this courageous responsibility,” Laurich told Fox News Digital. She added that the school had been considering the policy for a year before the official announcement last week.
“I would just add that we have been working on this plan for over a year. However, we felt that this was a necessary step that was needed for our school community,” Laurich said.
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
I maintain that Claudine Gay, the now-former president of Harvard University, just may have, though, mind you, quite by accident, made the world a much better place. She accomplished this not by resigning as president of Harvard over ineptitude and academic dishonesty, and not in any way, shape, form, manner, or style that she intended, but by being selected, despite austere qualifications, to be the president of one of our most prestigious universities in the first place.
Gay’s inexplicable rise and quite explicable fall illustrate, in a difficult-to-misinterpret fashion, the plain grift that is the DEI industry.
You can explain and attempt to justify DEI in all of the highfalutin terms that you want, but in the end, it comes down to something quite simple: it’s a way for those who eschew achievement, merit, honesty, and perseverance to get ahead on the dubious grounds of identity. It’s a con game designed to pour money into the coffers of those for whom a genuine work ethic is anathema.
It’s plain and simple grift, endorsed by our own government and institutions of higher education. You know, the same people who are supposed to be watching out for such things on our behalf. And worse, there was no need for DEI to ever get started in the first place.
Friends, the appalling Congressional testimony of three Ivy League university presidents served to blow the lid off of an increasingly dysfunctional culture on the campuses of our universities. We must ask ourselves, do we want to be sending our kids to schools whose presidents… pic.twitter.com/383BC20JVf
The man suspected of fatally shooting three people and wounding another at a Las Vegas university Wednesday was a professor who unsuccessfully sought a job at the school, a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation told The Associated Press.
The gunman was killed in a shootout with law enforcement, police said.
The suspect previously worked at East Carolina University in North Carolina, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release the information publicly.
Police didn’t immediately identify the gunman, the victims or a possible motive.
Reports of shots fired at about 11:45 a.m. sent police swarming onto the campus while students and professors barricaded themselves inside classrooms and dorm rooms.
Police said the shooting started on the fourth floor of the building that houses UNLV’s Lee Business School. The gunman went to several floors before he was killed in a shootout with two university detectives outside the building, said UNLV Police Chief Adam Garcia.
Authorities gave the all-clear about 40 minutes after the first report of an active shooter.
It is time to get your kids out of government-run schools. In fact, it has been time for parents to reject the public school system for ages. With the overt efforts to indoctrinate children, students in many schools are being taught to embrace far-leftist ideology on sexuality, gender identity, and race.
But now, it has become abundantly clear that kids are also being taught to be antisemitic bigots. The war between Israel and Hamas has inspired teachers and other members of school staff to use the fighting as an opportunity to inculcate students with another important facet of progressivism: A deep-seated hatred for the Jewish people.
Several news reports, along with footage circulating on social media, demonstrate that educators and school districts are encouraging students not only to oppose Israel, but also to despise Jews.
RedState’s Nick Arama wrote a piece on a situation that occurred at Hillcrest High School in New York in which a teacher had to hide herself from rampaging students because she attended a pro-Israel rally.
Students at Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens learned that one of their Jewish teachers had attended a pro-Israel rally and held up an “I stand with Israel” sign because they saw it on her Facebook.
“The teacher was seen holding a sign of Israel, like supporting it,” a senior told The Post this week.
“A bunch of kids decided to make a group chat, expose her, talk about it, and then talk about starting a riot.”
The students “tried to get into the teacher’s classroom, screaming ‘Free Palestine!’ and ‘[The teacher] needs to go!’”
In Brooklyn, high school students walked out of class to stage an anti-Israel protest. The event was organized by pro-Palestinian groups and was supported by the school district. The children chanted slogans like “Intifada,” and “From the river to the sea,” and “Israel is a racist state” and accused Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Actress Susan Sarandon showed up and expressed her own anti-Israel sentiments, saying that the Jews “are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.”
When Susan Sarandon said that Jews “are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country” she was saying that American Jews have it coming – that we don't deserve to live free from harassment and assault.
In another occurrence in Brooklyn, a parent advisory board organized and promoted a walkout for high school students to march for Palestinians. Hundreds of students marched while chanting slogans like “resistance is justified when people are occupied” and “f*ck the Jews.”
These are only a few examples of how schoolchildren are being taught and encouraged to hate the Jewish people and reflexively defend Hamas and the Palestinians. It is another cog in the progressive indoctrination machine that has grown far too powerful in K-12 education at government-run schools.
The Marxist crowd has already gone more than far enough in their quest to influence young minds to their way of thinking. They are not going to stop. Yes, there are those who are fighting against the far-leftist influence in government schools, but it’s an uphill battle and it might take years to move the needle.
At this point, the best way to shield children from these efforts is for parents who have the means to pull their kids from these schools. In states that have robust school choice measures, people should be taking full advantage of them. Placing their kids in private schools that have not bought into the progressive line, or even homeschooling, will not only ensure that children get a quality education, but it will also stop efforts to use education to brainwash them.
They’re not anti-war. They’re just on the other side.
The Yale Daily News last week cut out the reference from an Oct. 12 column by sophomore Sahar Tartak titled “Is Yalies4Palestine a hate group?”
“I’m still collecting my thoughts on the YDN’s egregious correction,” Tartak, editor in chief of rival campus newspaper Yale Free Press, wrote on her X social media account on Monday.
She reposted a comment by a Yale professor, Nicholas Christakis, who asked: “Are the hostage-taking, murder of children in their beds, burning of people alive, and parading of nude captive women in the street also ‘unsubstantiated’?”
Scores of those who were killed had been taking part in a music festival a few miles from the Israel-Gaza border fence when Hamas terrorists invaded the area using paragliders and pickup trucks.
Tartak condemned Yalies4Palestine, a student group which posted messages on Instagram blaming Israel for the atrocities.
I’m still collecting my thoughts on the YDN’s egregious correction. But until then, what Prof. Christakis and others have said does the job. https://t.co/qicDatZqDl
In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas assault, Yalies4Palestine posted an item on its official Instagram page which held “the Israeli Zionist regime responsible for the unfolding violence.”
Tartak penned a column on Oct. 12 titled “Is Yalies4Palestine a hate group?”
Yale Daily News
Another social media post by Yalies4Palestine called on “the Yale community to celebrate the resistance’s success,” according to Tartak.
The group went on to express “full support of the Palestinian people’s right to resist colonization and return to their land” while dismissing “nonviolent acts of resistance” as ineffective.
However, Hamas butchery has been met with skepticism and the Yale Daily News ran an editor’s note on Oct. 25 saying Tartak’s column “has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.”
The Post has sought comment from Tartak, the Yale Daily News, and Yalies4Palestine.
The controversy comes as Israel’s president revealed Monday that the German Israeli tattoo artist who was paraded through the streets of Gaza after being kidnapped by Hamas has been found dead after “sadistic” terrorists “chopped off her head.”
“I am truly sorry to report that we have now received news that Shani Nicole Louk has been confirmed murdered and dead,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog told the German newspaper Bild.
“Her skull was found,” he said, with the 23-year-old victim’s family also confirming that the death was confirmed by DNA on parts of her skull.
“This means that these barbaric, sadistic animals simply chopped off her head as they attacked, tortured and killed Israelis.”
Israeli military personnel involved in search and rescue operations of victims told reporters that they recovered beheaded bodies of infants at Be’eri, a kibbutz not far from the border fence ringing the Gaza Strip.
Israeli military Col. Golan Vach told reporters over the weekend that he found the body of a mother who was protecting a baby.
So, looking at the actions of pro-Hamas demonstrators on university campuses and in the streets of major blue-tinged cities over the last few weeks, we really don’t have to ask as Dorothy Thompson did, in mid-1941 – who goes Nazi? College students suckled on the sour teat of DIE-addled academicians with delusions of intellectual grandeur, for a certainty, and recent immigrants who have brought their unfortunate old habits of hate with them.
Still, when it comes to that first group, it has been amazing and disheartening to observe that sheltered twentysomethings driven to hair-trigger meltdown by the alleged presence of misogyny, the faintest hint of racism, and microaggressions so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye have enthusiastically aligned themselves with genocidal Jew haters from Gaza. Students and academics didn’t even pause for a split second, before cheering on indiscriminate random slaughter, torture, repeated rape so violent that it left pelvic bones broken, burning families alive in their own homes, looting and hostage-taking.
While those educated in the most prestigious universities and colleges in our fair nation may not grasp the obvious double-standard, a fair number of the rest of us see it all very plainly. Indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of civilians by armed bullies is bad, m’kay? The Geneva Convention, that much-violated set of rules governing the conduct of war operations, frowns on it, for all that only a few nations conducting warfare lately have ever observed them. I am also certain that I am not the only one of the post-WWII generation who had those few brave individuals who sheltered European Jews, or helped them escape from the Nazis’ “Final Solution” held up to me as the epitome of moral courage in a dark time.
So, it emerges that has been considerable blow-back to the poisonous Jew-hate on display after the October 7th Pogrom – students and individual bigots being doxed, fired, or having offers of post-graduate employment rescinded, counter-protests in front of their houses, anonymous death threats (so alleged), and the threat of an internet mob harassing them. My heart bleeds for them… well, no, it doesn’t. Not a bit of it – all this has been established as the accepted treatment for conservatives, or the unwary innocent caught by the progressive cancel culture mob. Let it all unfold in the manner established by the progressive mob.
Georgia Republican Lieutenant Gov. Burt Jones unveiled legislation on Wednesday that would annually pay school teachers $10,000 to carry a gun at school in an effort to increase safety on campuses.
“One of the most critical duties we have as public servants is to protect those who are most vulnerable – including all of Georgia’s children,” Jones said in a news release.
Jones said the legislation would use state funding to ensure Georgia’s school systems and teachers have the option to receive proper firearms training and certification. The plan also calls for stricter guidelines for existing school safety plans and to distribute more money to schools that hire school resource officers with police certification, The Associated Press reported.
“We feel like this is the best way to prepare faculty, but also prepare law enforcement and the system however we can,” Jones reportedly said at Austin Road Elementary School in Winder on Wednesday, adding the state should take more “proactive” measures to prevent school shootings.
Republican State Sens Max Burns and Clint Dixon joined the Lt. Gov. in crafting the 2024 legislative priority to increase school safety, contending that protecting children and their classrooms is their first responsibility.
The Oregon State Board of Education unanimously voted on Thursday to remove proof of mastery in reading, writing, and math in order to graduate from high school until 2029.
The board argued that requiring all students to pass one of several standardized tests or to create an in-depth assignment their teacher judged as meeting state standards was a harmful hurdle for students of color, disabled students, or those learning English as a second language. The standardized tests will still be given but will not play a role in determining whether students receive their diplomas.
“We haven’t suspended any sort of assessments,” state board member Vicky Lopez Sanchez said during the board meeting. “The only thing we are suspending is the inappropriate use of how those assessments were being used. I think that really is in the best interest of Oregon students.”
Opponents of the new order argued that removing the requirement devalues an Oregon diploma. The opponents argued that helping students with low academic skills through extra instruction in writing and math has helped them. However, supporters claim that forcing students to spend extra time on schoolwork eliminates their opportunity to take an elective and does not translate to how they perform after graduation.
“We are unable to ethically make a different decision at this point. It is also unethical for us to continue to require this when we know it can continue to cause harm and has had no change in how students are performing,” Board of Education Chairwoman Guadalupe Martinez Zapata told ABC’s KATU-2.
Hundreds of state residents have filed public comments on the subject, and most are in favor of keeping the requirements. But mastery is not the only graduation requirement. Students also need to earn a certain amount of credits and create an education plan that helps them achieve their goals after high school.
The pause was initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when schools across the country were forced to shut down
Again, a degree from Harvard has become not an achievement to the holder that opens doors closed to others, but a warning to any potential employer. https://t.co/GQR5KBe8Bb
Sergeant Major Benjamin Buzek MBA ‘22, a dedicated special operations non-commissioned officer, has been honored with the prestigious 2023 Sergeant Major Larry L. Strickland Educational Leadership Award for his remarkable contributions in creating educational avenues for non-commissioned officers (NCOs) within the U.S. Army. Sergeant Major of the Army Michael R. Weimer presented this distinguished award to Buzek during the award ceremony held at the Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C. on October 9.
When SGM Buzek earned his bachelor’s degree, he did so while balancing the demands of active service and parenthood. As he explored options to further his education and pursue an MBA, he wanted to do so without compromising his role as an active-duty soldier. Recognizing the need to expand educational horizons for enlisted personnel, he took it upon himself to pave a groundbreaking path in collaboration with William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business.
For years, the Major General James Wright MBA cohort at the Mason School of Business had been offered to active-duty officers through a partnership with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). However, a similar educational opportunity for active-duty NCOs was notably absent. Buzek worked through his chain of command to secure the necessary permissions, allowing him to enroll in the MBA program at the Mason School of Business, thereby setting a precedent for future NCOs.
SGM Buzek firmly believes that the ever-evolving nature of warfare demands a higher level of education for service members of all ranks, enabling them to make informed and strategic decisions in the heat of combat. He underscores the importance of having educated NCOs working alongside officers, as the modern battlefield operates at a rapid pace. “In today’s battlefield, the command team of officers and NCOs have to move at the speed of light because the enemy is moving that quickly,” emphasized Buzek. “So, I think it’s incredibly important that our force is educated, and our NCOs get the time to go to school.”
Since his graduation from William & Mary in August 2022, two other NCOs have successfully earned their MBA through Buzek’s innovative initiative. While the program presently has limited eligibility, SGM Buzek remains unwavering in his commitment to expand it further, ensuring this invaluable educational opportunity becomes accessible to more soldiers.
I recognize that it is probably not healthy to be motivated by negative emotions, but almost every time I sit down to work on my book on American gun culture, I am motivated by a review of my book proposal by someone who works as a public librarian in the United States:
While the author is an excellent academic and writes very well, it remains impossible to recommend this work.
I can appreciate how the author is seeking to break new ground in this field, but I cannot think of a more irresponsible premise.
The United States had 40 mass-shootings by January 24th this year (more shootings than days of the year).
Additionally, the author ignores the consistent research which continues to prove that not only does gun ownership has [sic.] “zero evidence of protective effects,” but also increases the odds that one will be shot to death (this includes those not owning guns, but merely living with someone who does).
I mean no.
The views put forth here are repressible; built on the backs of the grade school children who continually forfeit their lives.
The “irresponsible premise,” of course, being that guns are normal and normal people use guns.
This way of seeing drives me every day to try to hold a different mirror up to the reality of guns and gun culture in America.
It bears repeating; in 2023 a degree from Harvard isn't something a potential employer should find impressive, but should consider a warning. https://t.co/vFtFqWwKuP
The daughter of Scott Smith who was 15 at the time she was sexually assaulted by a boy in the girl’s bathroom has filed a lawsuit against the school system for $30 million.
A teenage girl who was sexually assaulted in a Virginia high school bathroom has sued Loudoun County Public Schools, alleging that school officials failed to heed warning signs about her attacker and responded to her May 2021 assault by trying to cover it up.
The teenager, who filed the lawsuit under the pseudonym “Jane Doe” along with her parents, was 15 years old when a younger, male student in a skirt assaulted her in a girls’ bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn on May 28, 2021.
The incident garnered national attention. Conservatives protested a policy in Loudoun County schools — put in place after the assault — that allowed transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity. Meanwhile, outraged parents in Loudoun County questioned why the perpetrator was moved to a different school, where he assaulted a second female student months later.
The story is a lot more complicated than this simple summary can convey. The girl had previously had some kind of sexual encounter with the boy in question in a school bathroom. This rendezvous was also planned but the incident became aggressive and the girl wanted it to stop.
Also, while it’s true the trans bathroom policy wasn’t in place at the time, it’s also true that the day of the incident the first report back to the school board was that the assault might be connected to the forthcoming bathroom policy. In other words, the very things “conservatives” protested was also the first thing school officials were worried about.
The boy’s mother has since claimed he was not trans or non-binary but no one denies he was wearing a skirt to school that day. Former school superintendent Scott Ziegler told the NY Timesin August that at a meeting on the day of the assault the school’s principal told him, “He runs with the drama crowd, and you know how the drama crowd can be. They’re attention-seeking. And he’s been experimenting with different looks.” So, yes, he wore skirts but “he has never come out to the school as either nonbinary or transgender.” More on the lawsuit.
