Free Republic

Full Title: Shocking all-out brawl at school bus stop in Alabama caught on camera as rival teens savage each other with fists, baseball bats, brass knuckles and even a gun Cell phone video surfaced showing kids armed with baseball bats and even a gun during the all-out brawl at an industrial park It's not clear what sparked the fight between two rival groups of teens More than a dozen were involved in the fight with several arrested Disturbing video has been released showing a brawl between two groups of adults and teenagers at an Alabama roadside. The video was captured...

Students at Pine Bush High School in Pine Bush, New York, knew right away there was something not quite right about the Pledge of Allegiance. That’s because the pledge was being recited in Arabic. “One nation under Allah,” the student body president announced over the intercom system on Wednesday. Reaction in the upstate New York high school was swift, and so was the backlash, The Times Herald-Record reports. Furious students tried to shout down the recitation in their classrooms. Other students sat down in protest. School Superintendent Joan Carbone told the newspaper that the Arabic pledge “divided the school in...

Two parents told Fox & Friends Thursday morning that a Black History Month event at their daughter’s Washington, D.C. school turned “anti-cop” when an act addressed Ferguson, to the point that they pulled their daughter. Their daughter was singing in the choir (featuring a Motown medley, natch), when mother Rebecca said she noticed the inclusion of slogans from the Ferguson and Eric Garner protests. “Everywhere that we looked were high school students wearing shirts that said ‘black lives matter,’ ‘I can’t breathe,’” she said, in the clip first spotted by TPM. “As I was flipping through the program it had...

LANSING -- The Michigan Senate passed a bill allowing up to three fundraising bake sales in public schools per week, providing a way around federal health standards that banned them. brownies. State Sen. Patrick Colbeck, R-Canton Township, introduced Senate Bill 109, which passed 36-1, with one senator excused from voting. Colbeck said Boy Scouts in his district asked him why the state banned bake sales in schools. After looking into it further, he realized Michigan had not approved exemptions from the federal Smart Snacks in School standards that disqualify most bake sale items. "(This bill is a) common sense change...

(CNN)"Hey! His head is bleeding! Yo, his head is bleeding!" a bystander screams. Martese Johnson is lying face-down on the pavement, blood flowing from his forehead. He was injured when Virginia alcohol control agents took him to the ground, trying to arrest him for public intoxication and obstruction of justice. As he's pinned, video captures him yelling: "I go to UVA! ... You f****** racists! What the f***? How did this happen?" An agent can be heard telling the student to stop fighting.

The University of Minnesota Duluth will begin offering a minor in LGBTQ studies so that students can be better prepared for life in “an increasingly diverse society.” To complete the minor, students will have to take classes such as “An Introduction to LGBTQ” (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer), “Queer Theory,” “Queer Media,” “Queer Cinema in International Perspective” and “History of the Homosexual Rights,” Campus Reform reported. “This minor will prepare students for life,” Gesa Zinn, head of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, told Campus Reform. ” ‘The job’ the LGBTQ minor prepares students for is to understand and...

LaKiesha Allen is a 35-year old Lansing school secretary who pays the Michigan Education Association $38 a month in union dues from her $23,000 annual salary. Local union officials have threatened to get her fired if she stops paying those dues. So Allen was stunned to learn that MEA President Steve Cook, a man she has never met, swung a deal with her employer to parlay his six-figure union salary into a richer pension payout. Cook's payout will come from the same pension fund that Allen is counting on for her own retirement – a fund that is currently underfunded...

The 2016 campaign has begun and higher education will probably play a bigger role than in any previous presidential campaign – and not because GOP contender Scott Walker is the first candidate in many years who didn’t earn a college degree. Since LBJ’s Great Society, the federal government has been promoting higher education through grants and easy loans. Politicians in both parties hyped the personal and national benefits of college. Boosting it seemed like a good idea at the time, but then so did pushing home ownership to achieve “the American dream.” Like most federal policies, the college-for-everyone push led...

A South Florida high school teacher who allegedly called a student a "rag head Taliban" was given a five-day suspension Tuesday. Maria Valdes, a teacher at Cypress Bay High School in Weston, won't be paid during her suspension, the Broward School Board said.

A middle school teacher in Louisiana received one of the most disgusting-looking lunches imaginable and posted a picture of it online yesterday. The post, titled "I'm a teacher. My school cafeteria served this today," said that the meal below was supposed to be "ham:" Unsurprisingly, the teacher decided not to eat her "meal" and threw the meat away after taking the picture. She also plans on sending the picture to her school's food director "who is supposed to be enforcing federal regulations."

PINE BUSH - An effort to celebrate national Foreign Language Week by reading the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic Wednesday has polarized Pine Bush High School into angry factions. The morning's regularly scheduled announcements included the Arabic reading of the pledge. According to students, the announcement was greeted by catcalls and angry denunciations in classrooms throughout the school by students who felt the reading was inappropriate. The reading became the subject of angry talk throughout the school and a cascade of tweets both from students who criticized the reading and those who supported it. The controversy has "divided the school...

An Edmond father’s response to a student who was planning a mass casualty event is going viral. Charles Martin’s son, Michael, is a freshman at Edmond North High School. Martin reacted a little out of the box to the news of the mass casualty plot uncovered at his son’s school. “The first thought just goes back to what it’s like being a teenager. It’s a brutal, brutal time,” said Martin. On Friday, Edmond police said they had uncovered a plan of a potential mass killing at the high school. Several students had come forward with text messages from the suspect...

In a scathing resignation letter about the issue, Oklahoma City math teacher Juli Sylvan blasted the controversial Common Core standards and exposed numerous serious problems with the Obama-backed scheme — including the fact that it is being quietly implemented in apparent defiance of state law. Among the most troubling elements, according to Sylvan — a veteran teacher with more than two decades in the classroom — is the data-mining of children, which she said she is not willing to facilitate. However, the problems with the administration-promoted national school standards are much more wide ranging. From using ineffective teaching methods and...

Federally-mandated changes to school lunches backed by first lady Michelle Obama helped cause an unprecedented drop in the number of students eating lunch, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO cited two factors stemming from the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which caused a decrease in the number of children eating school lunch each day: school childrens’ issues with “palatability” and “federally-mandated” increases in the price of school lunches. “Several factors likely influenced the recent decreases in lunch participation, and while the extent to which each factor affected participation is unclear, state and...

How bad is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s cut to higher education going to hurt? Bad, if UW Eau Claire is any indication. It’s the first university location to announce buyouts for employees, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports today. Three-hundred-twenty-five staff members — including those with tenure — are being offered “go away” packages by University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Chancellor James Schmidt. That’s a third of the people who work there. Under the terms of the UW-Eau Claire offer, employees 55 and older with at least five years of service in select departments and units will be eligible to receive a...

Black students at UC Berkeley often feel isolated and even oppressed, says a campus group that wants the nation’s premier public university to step up recruitment of African American students and improve support for them. So the Black Student Union hammered out 10 demands, delivered them to the chancellor, and set a deadline to meet them. The demands include renaming a building after Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther and the first woman on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists. To the students, Shakur is no terrorist. She’s a victim and ally who gives voice to their pain. The...

ATLANTA — After more than five years of controversy and five months of testimony, a prosecutor used seven words on Monday to recap the accusations against the dozen Atlanta educators seated in a courtroom here. “They cheated,” the prosecutor, John E. Floyd, told the jurors in Fulton County Superior Court. “They lied. And they stole.” Mr. Floyd’s scornful summary came near the start of what will be days of closing arguments centered on whether significant increases in standardized test scores in Atlanta’s public schools came about because of endemic cheating and what prosecutors say was criminal misconduct that included racketeering....

Earlier this school year, a sixth-grader in the gifted-and-talented program at Bedford Middle School in Bedford, Virginia was suspended for one year after an assistant principal found something that looked like a marijuana leaf in his backpack. The student, the 11-year-old son of two school teachers, had to enroll in the district's alternative education program and be homeschooled. He was evaluated by a psychiatrist for substance abuse problems, and charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court. In the months since September, he's become withdrawn, depressed, and he suffers from panic attacks. He is worried his life is over, according to...

As Americans, we tend to be pretty full of ourselves, and this is especially true of our young people. But do we really have reason for such pride? According to a shocking new report from the Educational Testing Service, Americans between the ages of 20 and 34 are way behind young adults in other industrialized nations when it comes to literacy, mathematics and technological proficiency. Even though more Americans than ever are going to college, we continue to fall farther and farther behind intellectually. So what does this say about us? Sadly, the truth is that Americans are stupid. Our...

FITCHBURG -- A former Fitchburg charter school sex-education teacher pleaded guilty Friday in Worcester Superior Court to a charge she raped a 14-year-old student, according to a report. Rachelle Gendron, 28, reached a plea agreement and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years of prison time and 10 years of probation, according to Tim Connolly, spokesman for Worcester County District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr.