State and Local News That Matters
A study published Tuesday at the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) has reaffirmed what past research has concluded: that children who come from stable families with married parents have a greater chance of academic success than those from non-intact, single-parent families.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) announced a plan to recruit public school teachers from other sectors of the community and retain effective teachers who can apprentice new recruits.
In a press conference Tuesday, DeSantis discussed three proposals he is presenting for Florida’s 2023 legislative session, all of which seek to recruit “the best and brightest” teachers in the state’s public school classrooms.
The grassroots website Awake-Illinois is reporting that only 23 of 860 school districts in the state have decided to adopt radical sex education standards, based on a national model, while 536 districts have thus far opted out.
Governor J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) signed SB 818 into law in August 2021, with his office claiming the standards are “voluntary” and will “emphasize health, safety, and inclusivity with age-appropriate resources.”
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (R) said Friday the state has not yet approved any school Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) for families seeking to choose education options outside of public schools.
“There are about 250 families that have actually applied (but) those approvals have not been made yet,” Lee said according to an updated report Saturday from the Associated Press (AP). “The process is underway.”
A psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Gender Multispecialty Service (GeMS) states in a video titled “Caring for Young Transgender Kids” that many children know they are transgender “as early as seemingly from the womb.”
“A good portion of children do know as early as seemingly from the womb,” says Kerry McGregor, PsyD in a Boston Children’s Hospital video from May 2021. “And they will usually express their gender identity as very young children, some as soon as they can talk. They may say phrases such as ‘I’m a girl,’ or ‘I’m a boy,’ or ‘I’m going to be a woman,’ ‘I’m going to be a mom.’”
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten said Wednesday at a union conference that conservatives are “working consistently” to undermine teachers.
“Conservatives are working consistently to undermine educators in this country,” Weingarten said at the New York State United Teachers conference this week. “They’re in the same race as we are between fear and hope, aspiration and despair, democracy and autocracy. And they’re doing this because our members worked so hard during COVID.”
A recent study finds the often “inaccurate” and “incomplete” informed consent process engaged in by transgender industry clinicians is propped up by the activist “alarmist” narrative whereby parents are told their failure to approve their child’s transgender medical treatments could likely result in his or her suicide.
In the study published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, Dr. Stephen B. Levine, of the Department of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, and his colleagues note the “unprecedented rise in the numbers of children and adolescents seeking gender transition” in under a decade.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education is encouraging teachers to host a “Gender-Neutral Day” for children with resources from the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Learning for Justice social justice education program.
The education department’s webpage titled “Gender/Gender Identity: Creating Gender-Inclusive Schools and Classrooms” contains a list of “Words You Should Know,” from “The Gender Spectrum,” which was published in 2013 by SPLC’s former Teaching Tolerance program.
“School choice is good for everybody but unions, socialist bureaucrats and the tired education establishment,” libertarian John Stossel wrote Wednesday at the New York Post.
The author and journalist observed the “silver lining” of the COVID pandemic is that parents discovered alternatives to public schools and, as the statistics are telling us, they continue to act on that discovery by removing their children from them – in droves.
The Biden administration will once again sow its seeds of division by proposing a rule to “protect” those claiming “gender identity” discrimination in federal healthcare programs, a move that is expected to generate religious freedom disputes.
The Biden Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Monday its proposed rule will implement Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to affirm that “protections against discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity” are “consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Bostock v. Clayton County,” and to reiterate “protections from discrimination for seeking reproductive health care services.”
LGBTQ activist organization the It Gets Better Project has awarded $10,000 in grant funds to 50 school districts across the country to promote gender ideology.
The project was founded by LGBTQ activist Dan Savage as an organization that provides anti-bullying support for LGBTQ teens, but Savage has a history of bullying teens himself – particularly, those who identify as Christian.
A Fox News Digital analysis of child sex crime data in school districts around the nation has found a minimum of 181 K-12 educators have been arrested on child-related sex crimes in the first half of 2022.
Among those educators arrested were four principals, 153 teachers, 12 substitute teachers, and 12 teachers’ aides. The crimes ranged from child pornography to rape of students.
An alleged teacher claiming to be “non-binary” gushed in a video posted to the Twitter account of Libs of TikTok that two of her students, including one first-grader, “came out as trans” to her after she read a book to her class that pushes gender ideology and pronoun usage to very young children.
“[I]t was such beautiful proof that kids of any age are absolutely capable of accepting anything that they are taught with love,” the teacher touted.
Betsy DeVos, who led the U.S. Department of Education under former President Donald Trump, now says the department should no longer exist, an assertion many Trump voters urged him to work to make a reality during his 2016 campaign.
“I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” DeVos said Saturday during a Moms for Liberty education summit in Tampa, Florida.
New York City public schools are expected to lose nearly 30,000 students by this coming academic year says the city’s Department of Education Office of Student Enrollment, reports the New York Post.
Data from the department show 28,100 fewer students are expected to enroll in city public schools this fall, with another 2,300 fewer students by the end of the academic year, the Post noted, adding, “By the end of next school year, the largest school district in the nation expects to serve a student population of just 760,439 children, the data show.”
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Governor Doug Ducey (R) said Thursday Arizona is now the “top state for school choice” and the “first state in the nation to offer all families” school choice options.
Ducey signed into law House Bill 2853, which allows all K-12 students in Arizona to be eligible for scholarship funds so they may access the education setting that best fits their needs.
The president of the nation’s largest teachers’ union told union delegates at the start of the Representative Assembly (RA) Sunday that 2016 was the year of a “fateful election,” one that made clear the U.S. Supreme Court would become “radicalized.”
In her keynote address Sunday in Chicago, National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle targeted former President Donald Trump for his choices in appointing Supreme Court justices.
A coalition of organizations and individuals convened by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) has released its model social studies standard, “American Birthright,” to teach America’s foundational history of liberty.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday in a 6-3 opinion the expressions of a high school football coach who prayed by himself at midfield after games are protected by both the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that coach Joseph Kennedy was fired “because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks.”
Taking aim once again at the Trump administration, the Biden education department released its proposed rule to revise how Title IX sex discrimination regulations will be enforced in education.
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement Thursday his department was releasing the proposed rules in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Title IX.
In a major decision for religious freedom and school choice, the Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a Maine law that barred taxpayer tuition assistance funds from families choosing religious schools.
The Court ruled, 6-3, in Carson v. Makin, the Maine law that governs its tuition program’s exclusion of religious schools, while accepting other private schools, is a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and is, therefore, unconstitutional.
National and state teachers’ unions condemned the Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday that held a Maine tuition assistance program that bars families from using the taxpayer funds for religious schools is in violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
Union officials denounced the ruling as one that “attacks public schools,” “erodes democracy,” “harms students,” and undermines “the separation of church and state.”
A bishop has revoked the “Catholic” status of a Jesuit middle school in Worcester, Massachusetts, for defying his order to stop flying flags supporting the LGBTQ “pride” and Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements.
“The Nativity School of Worcester is prohibited from this time forward from identifying itself as a ‘Catholic’ school and may no longer use the title ‘Catholic’ to describe itself,” Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester announced in a decree Thursday.
A University of South Carolina (USC) business school “diversity” program that appears to have accepted students of all races, except white, received the attention of one of the U.S. Civil Rights Commissioners, who wrote to inform the school’s interim president such racially exclusionary policies violate both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the U.S. Constitution.
Speaking for himself, and not the entire U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Peter Kirsanow wrote Thursday to Harris Pastides, USC interim president, about the Business Success Academy at the school’s Darla Moore School of Business.
Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday that directs his Departments of Health and Human Services and Education to further push life-altering, “gender-affirming” treatments in children who claim gender confusion, and increase LGBTQ activism infiltration, under the guise of anti-bullying and anti-suicide programs, in public schools throughout the United States.
The order is specifically aimed at states that have banned transgender medical interventions for minors, promoted parental rights, and that have blocked public schools from teaching concepts related to gender identity and sexuality to young children.
A study by the Heritage Foundation reveals a higher likelihood of youth suicide in states that allow minors to receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without parental consent – an outcome that contradicts what the “gender-affirming” crowd is fear-mongering to parents.
Research has shown the vast majority of children who express signs of gender dysphoria experience a resolution of the problem without medical intervention, but Heritage Senior Research Fellow Jay Greene, Ph.D. notes in his study, released Tuesday, that data indicating adolescents with gender confusion suffer from a high rate of suicide have been “invoked” by LGBTQ activist organizations, media, and even the White House, “to assert that cross-sex medical interventions reduce the risk of suicide.”
A study by the Heritage Foundation reveals a higher likelihood of youth suicide in states that allow minors to receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without parental consent – an outcome that contradicts what the “gender-affirming” crowd is fear-mongering to parents.
Research has shown the vast majority of children who express signs of gender dysphoria experience a resolution of the problem without medical intervention, but Heritage Senior Research Fellow Jay Greene, Ph.D. notes in his study, released Tuesday, that data indicating adolescents with gender confusion suffer from a high rate of suicide have been “invoked” by LGBTQ activist organizations, media, and even the White House, “to assert that cross-sex medical interventions reduce the risk of suicide.”
The nation’s future doctors who are currently members of the Medical Student Section (MSS) of the American Medical Association (AMA) have called for the organization to remove language from its current policy that states “family life education” should primarily be taught “in the home,” and replace it with language that states comprehensive sex education should be taught in schools.
According to a report at MedPage Today, during the AMA’s House of Delegates meeting in Chicago, some MSS delegates were in agreement with a representative from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and an alternate delegate physician from the California Medical Association, to promote shifting of funding away from curricula that emphasize delaying sexual activity and toward comprehensive sex education in schools at all levels.
The nation’s future doctors who are currently members of the Medical Student Section (MSS) of the American Medical Association (AMA) have called for the organization to remove language from its current policy that states “family life education” should primarily be taught “in the home,” and replace it with language that states comprehensive sex education should be taught in schools.
According to a report at MedPage Today, during the AMA’s House of Delegates meeting in Chicago, some MSS delegates were in agreement with a representative from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and an alternate delegate physician from the California Medical Association, to promote shifting of funding away from curricula that emphasize delaying sexual activity and toward comprehensive sex education in schools at all levels.
Parents and school district officials in Connecticut are considering hiring armed security guards in schools in the wake of the recent shooting massacre of 21 children and staff in Uvalde, Texas.
“We are proposing, due to our concerns over police response time, and I don’t say that as a fault to the police, that’s simply just a matter of reality that the police can’t get to a school immediately,” said Ian Neviaser, superintendent of Regional School District 18, Lyme-Old Lyme.