Posted on 02/23/2003 9:02:29 AM PST by bogeybob
WABI TV reported Friday that the Maine National Guard Family Assistance Center has received about 30 complaints from children of deployed soldiers concerning Principals, Teachers and Guidance Counselors reportedly demeaning the role of their deployed parent. Some children involved are 7 to 9 years of age.
Here is a letter written to a friend of mine from the Maine Army National Guard:
"Thank you for your interest on this most troubling matter. Our Family Assistance Centers have reported cases from Aroostook County to Southern Maine. We are reluctant to give out specific schools and the individuals involved in the interest of giving the education community a chance to address the problem itself. Also, parents wanted the opportunity to pursue the issue through their local school boards first.
In all, we have over thirty complaints that name schools and individual principals, teachers and guidance counselors. If one considers that these complaints come from just the parents who attended our briefings and only from children who told their parents, we are concerned that the problem may be more widespread than we know.
We are recording the complaints, and I will personally visit these educators to express our concern as a professional organization and ask for their cooperation.
Ultimately, our main concern and first responsibility is the safety of our children during these uncertain times. Maine has a core of dedicated and professional educators, but we will challenge any individual who places our children at risk due to their own political ideologies."
The RUSH is ON IT!!!
He just gave it about 7 minutes, and OOOOOH Lordy; did he ever JACK 'em!Stand by for some VERY interesting, I predict, call-ins about it!
YO RUSH! I knew you'd come through for us!
Thanks to the media, this is now national news and might save other children, in other states, from emotional distress.
Job well done. Let's all stay vigilant.
We'd better stay on top of this though, and not let it just dry up and blow away, as it will if we get complacient.
Then these same perps; agenda-driven PC control freaks will just stick all that "Sensitivity" they were just provided with in the desk drawer and go right back to building the American Socialist Utopia in the minds of our Children, who are essentially being held hostage by a bureaucracy of social indoctrination.
And we can't let that happen now, can we?
As a Maine teacher myself, I know as soon as I post this I am going to get on a bus and head for Washington where I will wait at the mall for my ignominious end. But first I must apologize to all those children whose lives I have ruined. I know that all during my career as soon as I was able to point out the political and moral shortcomings of my students' parents, I jumped right on it. And if ever I got a chance to completely trash a child's memory of their parent, or better yet, their poor dead grandmother, I attacked with all the vehemence of Ted Kennedy chowing down at an all-you-can-eat buffet. I always know that there is at least a couple of minutes available among the hours I spend teaching and preparing for class to twist their minds and inflict a little emotional pain.
While I'm sure there are more than a few socialists among the teachers of America, I have yet to see one named in any story written on these alleged offenses. I have yet to see one sued, as O'Reilly suggested, or for that matter interviewed by him, and I have yet to see one punched out by a ticked off tank driver who has just been told he must ship out to Iraq. I'm also quite sure that some teachers are quite capable of doing just what the Maine Army National Guard says they have. They are presumably just as human as you and I. I ask only that those of us who claim to be the thinking, reasoning, conservatives we profess to be demonstrate that thinking and reasoning in their posts.
This is from a Feb. 27 Washington Times article by Robert Stacy McCain: "Mr. Albanese (commissioner of education) told the Bangor Daily News that only one complaint involved classroom remarks, after the child of a Guard member became upset during a discussion of Iraq when a teaching assistant "took up the anti-war" argument.
Other incidents, according to Mr. Albanese, involved a child who had requested to leave school early for a military-related activity and a student who was teased on a school bus because he has a parent in the military."
The evidence is underwhelming.
My problem, if you didn't get it in the first post, is two-fold: one, I don't believe it is ethical to run a story that libels an entire work force without examining the evidence; and two, I don't think that thoughtful, intelligent people should take what little real evidence there is and extrapolate that to the point where they paint all teachers - Mainers or otherwise - as socialists, or communists, or even anti-war.
When I refer to evidence, I mean that the reporters who investigated this should have searched out a teacher-offender to interview. This is not as hard as it seems. You just get your butt down to where the guardsmen are and start asking questions until you find someone whose child has been offended by a teacher. If the anti-military rhetoric is as prevalent as my fellow posters believe, it shouldn't be too hard to find someone to interview. I have a second job after school, so I rarely get to watch O'Reilly, but he claims to have looked into this. If so, has he used his vast resources (the same ones allegedly used to help bring down a terrorist cell) to find one of these teachers, or even one of the guardsmen, and interview them? I realize that the guardsmen probably have been told to avoid the press, and the offending teachers may not be willing to talk. In that case the reporter reports that he made contact, but the person was unwilling to comment. However, you'd be surprised at how eager even the guilty are to spill their guts to a reporter, especially a TV reporter. If you don't even attempt to find anyone, then you are just a lazy journalist.
Those of you responding to the articles should be careful about making assumptions about teachers in Maine. One of the first posts said that Maine was a very liberal state. While the city of Portland may be quite liberal, much of the rest of the state is not. We are actually fairly evenly divided politically. This is reflected in the union membership and in turn makes it difficult for the union to influence politics much.
Although the MEA endorsed Baldacci, I don't get the impression that he feels he owes us much and in truth, he probably doesn't. I don't believe we brought him all that many votes with our endorsement. In fact, the governor recently appointed a former school superintendent as commissioner of education instead of another woman recommended by the MEA.
So much for political clout.
As for the war, I support the President, but I am not so naive as to believe we are going to Iraq simply to prevent terrorism. This war, like most, is really about money and maintaining the status quo. I happen to like the status quo and will not be sad to see a regime change. And if we are the ones to change it, then we should reap the benefits. In this case, oil.
My problem, if you didn't get it in the first post, is two-fold: one, I don't believe it is ethical to run a story that libels an entire work force without examining the evidence; and two, I don't think that thoughtful, intelligent people should take what little real evidence there is and extrapolate that to the point where they paint all teachers - Mainers or otherwise - as socialists, or communists, or even anti-war.
When I refer to evidence, I mean that the reporters who investigated this should have searched out a teacher-offender to interview. This is not as hard as it seems. You just get your butt down to where the guardsmen are and start asking questions until you find someone whose child has been offended by a teacher. If the anti-military rhetoric is as prevalent as my fellow posters believe, it shouldn't be too hard to find someone to interview. I have a second job after school, so I rarely get to watch O'Reilly, but he claims to have looked into this. If so, has he used his vast resources (the same ones allegedly used to help bring down a terrorist cell) to find one of these teachers, or even one of the guardsmen, and interview them? I realize that the guardsmen probably have been told to avoid the press, and the offending teachers may not be willing to talk. In that case the reporter reports that he made contact, but the person was unwilling to comment. However, you'd be surprised at how eager even the guilty are to spill their guts to a reporter, especially a TV reporter. If you don't even attempt to find anyone, then you are just a lazy journalist.
Those of you responding to the articles should be careful about making assumptions about teachers in Maine. One of the first posts said that Maine was a very liberal state. While the city of Portland may be quite liberal, much of the rest of the state is not. We are actually fairly evenly divided politically. This is reflected in the union membership and in turn makes it difficult for the union to influence politics much.
Although the MEA endorsed Baldacci, I don't get the impression that he feels he owes us much and in truth, he probably doesn't. I don't believe we brought him all that many votes with our endorsement. In fact, the governor recently appointed a former school superintendent as commissioner of education instead of another woman recommended by the MEA.
So much for political clout.
As for the war, I support the President, but I am not so naive as to believe we are going to Iraq simply to prevent terrorism. This war, like most, is really about money and maintaining the status quo. I happen to like the status quo and will not be sad to see a regime change. And if we are the ones to change it, then we should reap the benefits. In this case, oil.
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