Free Republic

School officials in northern Colorado are asking parents to take care with their newly legal recreational marijuana, after fourth graders were caught dealing the drug on an elementary school campus. John Gates, director of safety for Weld County School District 6, said Wednesday that the students involved, three 10-year-old boys and a 10-year-old girl at Greeley’s Monfort Elementary School, faced tough discipline but not suspension or expulsion. He would not elaborate on their punishment. […] The marijuana appears to have been legally purchased by adults—grandparents in two families—and no charges were expected to be filed, Gates said. He said the...

Eighteen year-old Jordan Wiser is training to be a firefighter. He’s a certified emergency vehicle operator who works as a first responder when he’s not attending high school. And, after just spending 13 days in jail, he’s now facing felony charges for weapons possession. The weapon? A pocketknife. It was in his EMT vest, and he uses it to cut through seatbelts when he’s practicing saving lives.

Last week, Virginia Beach, Virginia sixth grader Adrionna Harris noticed her classmate doing something terrible – he was cutting his arm with a small razor. The Bayside Middle School student knew that was wrong, so she stepped in and took the razor away, and threw it out. It was an act that one mightthink would earn her praise from her school. As WAVY 10 On Your Side News reports, it instead earned her a suspension and possible expulsion. That’s right, Adrionna received a 10-day suspension, the only reason being because she had admitted what happened. With the weapon disposed, it...

We teach kids that honesty is the best policy, but at one Virginia Beach middle school it might be better to keep the truth to yourself. Last Thursday at Bayside Middle School, sixth grader Adrionna Harris came to the aide of a classmate who was cutting his arm. She faces expulsion for taking a razor from the student, throwing it away and convincing him what he was doing wasn’t right. She thought she was doing the right thing, so on Friday she told the school administration what happened. The way school officials responded led to this question: was the school’s...

Indeed, in the example of guns, they expressly believe that some firearms possess quantifiably greater evil than others, depending entirely on their appearance, despite being lifeless objects. An equivalent belief would be that a paring knife is certainly evil, but a carving knife is purely demonic. To a rational person, such an unhinged thought process more than merely hints at lunacy. Inanimate objects do not possess inherent evil. It can’t be built in, absorbed or grown inside a gun. In fact, the only things on Earth that have that ability are people. And yet, despite living in a world defined...

An Ohio high school student training to be an EMT was charged with a felony and sent to jail for 13 days because police found a pocketknife during an unauthorized search of his car. Jordan Wiser, an 18-year-old student at Ashtabula County Technical and Career Campus in Jefferson, Ohio, is an EMT trainee with a passion for self-defense and public service. He aspires to be a firefighter, and is a certified emergency vehicle operator. Wiser is comfortable with weapons, and posts Youtube videos of himself talking about law enforcement, self-defense and video games. Apparently, school administrators caught wind of the...

Did an Ohio elementary school jump the gun in its punishment of a 10-year-old? Devonshire Alternative Elementary School in North Columbus, Ohio, suspended a fifth grader for three days after he pointed his finger in the shape of a gun at another student’s head. Paul Entingh said his 10-year-old son, Nathan, was just messing around during science class. "He asked his friend to borrow a pencil and when his friend dropped it, my son Nathan was playing around and he did that with his fingers. Pointed it at the kid, said 'boom,'" Entingh told Fox 28. Paul and Nathan were...

<p>A Minnesota public high school was so committed to obeying its fire drill policy to the exact letter of the law that it forced a female student–dressed only in a swimsuit, and sopping wet–to stand outside in the freezing cold for ten minutes. As a result, she suffered frostbite.</p>

America's kids have been suspended for pretending that pencils were guns, but an Ohio school may have topped that. A 10-year-old student at a Columbus elementary school was handed a three-day suspension for making a finger gun and pretending to shoot a classmate. The suspension letter more formally referred to his weapon as a "level 2 lookalike firearm," reports the Columbus Dispatch. Devonshire Alternative Elementary School's principal says students have been frequently told not to play pretend gun games, with a district rep saying kids were warned consequences would follow. Those consequences hit hard last week for fifth-grader Nathan Entingh,...

As a hard-partying teenager, Patrick Kennedy met President Reagan at a fundraiser for the JFK Library, a meeting captured in a photograph that the former Rhode Island congressman now hangs in his home office. He used to think of it as a funny episode, a collision of Camelot’s cocaine kid and America’s foremost opponent of illegal drug use. But Kennedy took his last hit of anything in 2009, and he’s since honed an anti-drug message that sounds a bit like Reagan with a Boston brogue. Kennedy believes there is "an epidemic in this country of epic dimensions when it comes...

CHICAGO, Il.— Criticizing Chicago school officials for being overzealous, misguided and incapable of distinguishing between an impotent toy and a dangerous weapon, The Rutherford Institute has come to the defense of an 11-year-old boy who was suspended from school after he voluntarily turned in a non-firing plastic toy gun that had been forgotten in his jacket pocket. Caden Cook, a sixth grader at Fredrick Funston Elementary School, was suspended for allegedly violating the school’s weapons policy against dangerous objects, in addition to being ordered to undergo counseling, and subjected to intimidation tactics, interrogation, and dire threats by school officials—all without...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Obama considers revoking trademark protection for the Washington Redskins’ name because some people said it was offensive It was recently reported that the Obama administration was considering revoking trademark protection for the Washington Redskins’ name because some people said it was offensive.This could set a horrible precedent.Just about every R-rated movie includes content that someone would consider offensive, whether that content be violence, sex, profanity, etc. The same can be said for the content of many books, the lyrics of many songs, the content of many paintings, etc. If any copyright, patent, trademark, etc., can be...

Let me begin this post with a personal anecdote. True story: I was once arrested for participating in an abortion protest. It was a standard banana-republic arrest and charges were dropped because there was no basis for arresting us. But I got to spend a night in jail—a rather light version where all us pro-lifers got to sack out together. The room was quite familiar to me—the paint, the décor, the cinderblock wall underneath. It was the same as every American schoolroom I had ever been inside. Moving on to what might seem like a different subject: What a great...

Attorney General Eric Holder slammed schools’ disciplinary standards that result in a “disproportionate number of minorities being penalized. These school administrators may feel that they’re being fair because the same rules apply to all students. But I’m saying this kind of simplistic notion is not good enough.” Holder suggested that “differences in the subcultures of students from different racial, social, and economic backgrounds must be considered. Minorities who have been subjected to generations of oppression have a right to strike back against this oppression. An action that might justifiably be regarded as unwarranted if committed by a member of the...

We hear a lot about bullying as if it’s as common as cheering at a football game. But who is really the Big Bully in our public schools? Who is throwing their weight around all the time? More specifically, who is insisting on the use of bad methods that never seem to work better this year than 10 years ago? Who is making lame excuses for poor performance so that nothing seems to get better? Who fills the air with propaganda and sophistry so that no one can think clearly about the issues facing us? Consider Whole Word. Rudolf Flesch...

<p>Attorney General Eric Holder recently made comments suggesting that Zero Tolerance policies in US schools place minority students at an unfair advantage.</p> <p>Education experts blasted a recent Department of Justice directive, which they say seems to advocate a racial quota system for punishing school kids for such transgressions as being late or chewing gum in class.</p>

January 08, 2014, 12:54 pm Holder: School discipline racially biased, overly harsh By Ben Goad Attorney Gen. Eric Holder called upon the nation’s school districts Wednesday to re-think “zero tolerance” disciplinary policies that he said disproportionately punish minorities and push too many students into to the justice system. “Alarming numbers of young people are suspended, expelled, or even arrested for relatively minor transgressions like school uniform violations, schoolyard fights, or showing “disrespect” by laughing in class,” Holder said during a speech in Baltimore. Holder’s remarks accompany the release Wednesday of new federal guidance from the departments of Justice and Education...

he Obama administration is issuing new recommendations on classroom discipline that seek to end the apparent disparities in how students of different races are punished for violating school rules. Civil rights advocates have long said that a "school-to-prison" pipeline stems from overly zealous school discipline policies targeting black and Hispanic students that bring them out of school and into the court system. Attorney General Eric Holder said the problem often stems from well intentioned "zero-tolerance" policies that too often inject the criminal justice system into the resolution of problems. Zero tolerance policies, a tool that became popular in the 1990s,...

DENVER - While marijuana may be legally purchased, legally possessed and legally smoked as of January 1, under Colorado law, it can also get you legally fired. There is already a precedent for this in the state courts. In 2010 a Colorado man was fired by his employer, Dish Network, for using medical marijuana off-duty. The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the firing which is now being heard by the Colorado Supreme Court. Amendment 64 gives employers the same discretion, allowing them to prohibit marijuana use both on and off the job. Marijuana proponents believe it's a double-standard. "No business...

On December 4, 2013 Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million member American Federation of Teachers(AFT), spoke on C-Span about bullying, particularly of gay students. Ms. Weingarten said, with surprise in her voice, that she doesn't understand why gay students are still bullied in public schools, because in 2013, "It's cool to be gay." She also said she is gay, and now speaks about it openly.As a psychotherapist, I tell clients that being surprised by another person's behavior often results from erroneous assumptions about the person, usually because you see them as you want them to be rather than as they...