Category: Mission

Such a Political Divide…
Living in fear…
When will our precious children be a priority???
#GunReformNow
#BanAssaultWeaponsNow
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America’s kids are failed again
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 9:09 AM EDT, Tue March 28, 2023

When will our children be a priority? All this political divisiveness at the sake of our precious children’s lives… Something must be done now…How many more deaths?All the rhetoric does not mean much….

A more heartrending and quintessentially American scene is hard to imagine.

A human chain of children, hand-in-hand, shepherded by police officers, fled the latest school struck by unfathomable tragedy. On Monday, it was Nashville’s turn to join the roster of cities made notorious by a mass shooting epidemic much of the country seems prepared to tacitly accept as the price of the right to own high-powered firearms…

The reality of what unfolded inside was inhuman, but it can unfortunately be imagined given the gruesome insider accounts that emerged from previous school shootings – in Uvalde, Texas, last year, or at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in 2012.

Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all 9 years old, were gunned down by a shooter armed with two AR-style weapons and a handgun, two of which police said were bought legally. Their names – known only to the rest of America in death – were released by police about the same time as they should have been going home from Covenant School for the day

Three staff, all half a century older, also died. They were Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61…

They were all murdered in the place that should be the safest: where kids go to school. But a plague of recent classroom rampages, distinguished even among America’s gun violence by their depravity, shows that nowhere is really secure. That’s why millions of parents often drop their kids off with a nagging fear about whether their school is next. And it’s why a generation of kids has endured active shooter drills that will mark them – just as children halfway through the last century dived under desks in duck-and-cover practices in case of atomic warfare. The difference now is that the danger comes not from a foreign nuclear rival but from within…

Firearms are the leading cause of death in American kids aged 1 to 19, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation based on 2020 data. And while many guns claim kids in violent neighborhoods, not in the classroom, schools seem to be increasingly vulnerable…

According to data from the Gun Violence Archive, the Nashville horror was among at least 130 mass shootings so far this year – more than this point in any previous year since at least 2013. (The GVA, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.) Such events are now so frequent that there are some cases of people who survived one such event getting caught up in the aftermath of a subsequent one.

Ashbey Beasley, who escaped the July Fourth mass shooting last year in Highland Park, Illinois, was visiting Tennessee on a family trip when Monday’s shooting occurred. She made an unannounced appearance on live television and asked, “How is this still happening? Why are our children still dying?”

Revealing another tragic web of gun violence consequences, Beasley later told CNN’s Erin Burnett that she had arranged to have lunch with a friend whose son was killed in a mass shooting at a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee, five years ago, who called her to let her know her living son was in lockdown in a Nashville school because of Monday’s mass shooting..

“This is where we are at, we have children living through multiple mass shooting (incidents). What are we doing?” Beasley told Burnett. Former President Barack Obama tweeted a video of Beasley’s original comments, writing, “We are failing our children.”…

Futile rituals…

Monday’s shooting in Illinois was so frustrating to people like Beasley because the rituals that followed it were so familiar – and so futile. Everyone knows that they will be going through the same routine again soon. Republican politicians quickly offered “thoughts and prayers” or stayed silent. Their Democratic counterparts demanded gun reform. Calls for an improvement in mental health care, which spring up after every mass shooting, are likely next…

At the White House, President Joe Biden diverted from remarks at a previously scheduled event highlighting the role of women in small business to address yet another school shooting...

We have to do more to stop gun violence. It’s ripping our communities apart, ripping the soul of this nation,” the grim-faced president said. Biden made the call for action that is now a defining feature of the ineffective political maneuvering that always follows mass shootings, whether they are in schools in Texas or Tennessee or a supermarket in Buffalo or on a university campus in Michigan.

“I call on Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban. It’s about time that we began to make some more progress,” Biden said. The president understands perfectly that such a step was impossible in the past Congress and will be in the present one, where Republicans control the House and Democrats are still well short of 60 votes in the Senate. A presidential call for action has almost become a custom of mourning as much as a plea for political coalition building. Biden will likely be doing something similar again very soon…

America’s frozen guns debate…

One of the top Senate Republicans, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, quickly tamped down any ideas that the deaths of three small kids and three adults who looked after them would make any political difference. “I would say we’ve gone about as far as we can go – unless somebody identifies some area that we didn’t address,” Cornyn told CNN…

The Texas Republican was a vital player in passing bipartisan gun legislation last year despite some fierce opposition from gun rights activists in his home state. The new law, which was the most significant federal firearms reform in decade, followed the horrific shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde that killed 21 people. While it doesn’t ban any weapons, it includes measures offering states more incentives to fund red flag laws, which allow courts to temporarily seize firearms from anyone believed to be a danger to themselves or others. This was all a fragile Senate coalition could bear.

Despite his previous role, Cornyn also expressed some frustration with Biden’s remarks. “The president just keeps coming back to the same old tired talking points. So he’s not offering any new solutions or ideas. If he does, I think we should consider them, but so far, I haven’t heard anything.”

In one sense, Cornyn – who predicted no action on guns until at least the next election – was simply stating the facts. Biden does call for an assault weapons ban after most mass shootings. But to hear such a suggestion described as “tired talking points” is still jarring after Monday’s shooter was carrying two AR-style weapons and killed six people.

The Texas senator also encapsulated the reality, frustration and limitations of the guns debate. He said that such bans would affect “law-abiding citizens” adding, “I don’t believe those law-abiding citizens are a threat to public safety.”

Cornyn is right that most Americans who own such firearms never infringe the law, use their weapons recklessly or much less launch mass shootings. But at the same time, some of these weapons designed for the battlefield have the capacity to cause enormous carnage in just a few moments. The assailants that open fire with them in schools, shopping malls or bars have sometimes been law-abiding until their attacks…

The political argument on guns is essentially about the rights of which Americans take priority. Is it those of citizens who own such weapons, even though a tiny minority of them use them to create mayhem and murder? Or should it be the victims of gun crime, like those kids and adults gunned down in Nashville, who had their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness eradicated in a few seconds of terror?

“Our message here is very, very clear: Enough is enough. We need to see action in Congress,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “This Morning” Tuesday, rejecting Cornyn’s remarks…

A political tragedy underlies many of these mass shootings. In a bitter political climate, where any attempts at gun legislation are portrayed as an attempt to illegally snatch away firearms, there is no reachable common ground between upholding the constitutional right to bear arms and the wishes of many Americans who want stricter gun laws…

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a hero of the conservative movement, wrote in the Heller opinion in 2008 that it was permissible for the government to regulate firearms while remaining faithful to the Second Amendment. He wrote that the right secured by the amendment was not “a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

That’s a position that has long been overtaken by the Republican Party’s march to the right – a fact that Cornyn implicitly underscored in his comments.

This lack of any common ground on an issue of deadly importance parallels the wider disconnect in a politically polarized society that increasingly lacks a common cultural understanding…

This political paralysis means that there are almost certainly some young kids going to school as usual on Tuesday morning, who, one day, won’t come home after class.

Closed historic Eatonville Hungerford school opened doors…

https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2023/03/15/former-student–closed-historic-eatonville-black-school-opened-doors-#

Now-closed historic Hungerford school in Eatonville opened doors for Black students…

Eatonville is a town in Orange County, Florida, United States, six miles north of Orlando. It is part of Greater Orlando. Incorporated on August 15, 1887; oldest self-governing all-black municipalities in the United States. The Eatonville Historic District and Moseley House Museum are in Eatonville…[ Author Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville and the area features in many of her stories…

EATONVILLE, Fla. — Any day now, the community expects to learn what will happen to 100 acres of land in one of the oldest historically Black towns in the United States, Eatonville…

Eatonville’s Town Council recently voted against rezoning the land, which would have cleared the way for development that many residents say would erase the town’s history and price current residents out.

Many residents, including alumna Vera King, simply want the land back to decide on their own what gets built there…

“Hungerford and Jones High School were the only two Black schools in Orange County,” King says.

Grabbing a stack of school yearbooks is the perfect way for her to take a walk down memory lane. She chuckles and flashes a bright smile as she points to a picture of herself in one of the yearbooks.

“Aww…I was a cheerleader, and that’s in one of these books right here,” she says as she flashes a bright smile, chuckles and points to a picture of herself.

The memories come flooding back…

King was born in the town of Eatonville in 1937.

“It’s a very special part of me,” she says.

A short walk into her backyard these days provides proof of the winds of change. King remembers as a curious child not the distinctive roar of traffic, like you hear now around Robert Hungerford Preparatory High School, but something else as clear as day…

Years later, she attended the school from the eighth grade to the 12th grade…

“We had teachers who reached out to us in ways that had nothing to do with the books,” she added. “It put a lot of people into the working world. They encouraged you, if you could — if your parents could afford it — to go to college. But they also knew that there were a number of us who could not afford to go, so they gave us skills that would help us to get jobs.”

King was one of those students…

“I really give my business ed(ucation) teacher credit for putting me into the working world,” she says. “She was very strict. You didn’t touch her typewriter until you knew the keyboard.”

King eventually landed a job at the high school “because my principal was still there, and he needed a secretary,” she says.

In 1999, she retired…

There’s not much left of the school now, King says.

Walking up to the land where the school once stood, King can peer through the chain-link fence. “And go straight down. That would be the front of the school. That’s where the office was.” There’s not much left of the school now.

“There’s nothing out here,” she says. “They didn’t even save the bell.”

She says she longs to see something in its former location that pays homage to the school — more than just a plaque, something that rings true to the spirit of the historic Florida town, just like that old school bell.

“Even if they had some vocational classes out here,” King says.

The Southern Poverty Law Center recently wrote a letter to Orange County Public Schools, saying that if the school board continues with the sale, it could be a violation of civil rights for the residents of Eatonville because it could have an adverse impact on the residents. SPLC also maintains that before OCPS takes any action, it needs to conduct a study on what those effects could be…

https://florida.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/aml15.ela.lit.setting/setting-eatonville-florida/

By Jack Forrest, CNN
Published 7:45 AM EDT, Fri March 17, 2023

CNN
—
A federal appeals court on Thursday ruled that a temporary block on a portion of a law pushed by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis restricting what can be taught in Florida’s public colleges and universities will remain in place.

The three-judge panel of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request from the DeSantis administration and officials with the state university system to stay an injunction from US District Judge Mark Walker, who called the law “positively dystopian” in a 138-page order, while the case plays out.

Last April, DeSantis signed into law Florida’s Individual Freedom Act, better known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” but it has faced a number of legal challenges since taking effect on July 1. The law is a key component of DeSantis’ war on “woke ideology,” and was intended to prevent teachings or mandatory workplace activities that suggest a person is privileged or oppressed based necessarily on their race, color, sex or national origin.

With the law, Walker wrote in November that Florida “lays the cornerstone of its own Ministry of Truth under the guise of the Individual Freedom Act” – invoking George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”

“The Court did not rule on the merits of our appeal. The appeal is ongoing, and we remain confident that the law is constitutional,” DeSantis’ spokesman Bryan Griffin said in a statement.

The Legal Defense Fund, which represented the plaintiffs in the case, celebrated the decision.

“Institutions of higher education in Florida should have the ability to provide a quality education, which simply cannot happen when students and educators, including Black students and educators, feel they cannot speak freely about their lived experiences, or when they feel that they may incur a politician’s wrath for engaging in a fact-based discussion of our history,” Alexsis Johnson, assistant counsel of The Legal Defense Fund, said in a statement.

Opponents of the law are fighting it on three fronts: the law’s effects on K-12, higher education and employers.

Last August, Walker granted an injunction filed by two Florida-based employers, who wanted to require diversity and inclusion trainings for staff, and a consultant who provides such training. Walker at the time called the law “upside down” when it comes to the First Amendment because it allows the state to burden freedom of speech.

CNN’s Joe Sutton, Sabrina Clay, Nicquel Terry Ellis, Steve Contorno and Kit Maher contributed to this report.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/17/politics/desantis-anti-woke-law-appeal-block/index.html

BY LUCA GOLDMANSOUR FEBRUARY 23, 2023

Gov. Ron DeSantis wants Florida’s K-12 educators to do as they’re told… On top of low pay, difficulties in securing long-term contracts, the stress of high-stakes testing, and increases in student mental health issues, public school teachers must stick to the governor’s conservative script or risk being fired..

That script includes the Parental Rights in Education Act, colloquially known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, the Stop WOKE Act, and the recent statewide ban on College Board’s Advanced Placement African American studies curriculum.

These developments have contributed to the highest teacher vacancy rate in the country by creating a climate of paranoia that has exasperated many teachers, chased others out of the profession entirely, and deterred aspiring educators. Culture-war turmoil combined with the pandemic era’s tight labor market means that Florida and most Deep South states have struggled to recruit teachers. When the far-right Republican became governor in 2019, there were 2,217 vacant teacher positions in Florida. As of early January, there were about 5,300 openings statewide, with an additional 4,631 support staff openings (excluding Miami-Dade County), the Florida Education Association told the Prospect.

In 2022, Florida allocated an additional $250 million over the previous fiscal year to increase teacher salaries. While the funding boosted the base salary for new teachers to $47,500, the pay increase for experienced teachers did not even cover cost-of-living increases. Overall, the pay raise bumped the state up from 49th to 48th in average teacher pay nationwide, according to the National Education Association. DeSantis has proposed $200 million in more funding for teacher pay in his fiscal 2023-2024 budget, which according to the FEA, will hardly move the needle. “Pay in the third-largest state can and should rank in the top 10 nationally,” FEA President Andrew Spar said in a statement.

More from Luca GoldMansour

Florida’s vacancy issue has its roots in the state’s decades-long role as a laboratory for the right’s assault on public education, with its Republican governors playing key parts. Former Gov. Jeb Bush made school choice and high-stakes standardized testing his signature issues in the 2000s, before his brother President George W. Bush took “reforms” like the No Child Left Behind Act to the White House. DeSantis’s predecessor, Rick Scott, now the state’s junior senator, also expanded charter schools and voucher programs while chipping away at long-term contracts for teachers. But DeSantis has not only built on his predecessors’ devotion to privatization and exploitative salaries, he has also squelched teaching, learning, and productive dialogues on American history, race, and gender.

The teacher shortages exhaust the remaining educators, and buttress DeSantis’ conservative takeover of public-school curriculums by whittling down institutional resistance to his culture-war inspired edicts. Educators are “frustrated to the point where they don’t have a sense of hope anymore,” said Steve Frazier, Executive Director of the Florida League of Middle Schools, who worked as a teacher and principal in Broward County for over three decades. “It’s like anything, you keep getting beat down, eventually you just wave the white flag and say I can’t do it anymore.”

Florida’s vacancy issue has its roots in the state’s decades-long role as a laboratory for the right’s assault on public education, with its Republican governors playing key parts. Former Gov. Jeb Bush made school choice and high-stakes standardized testing his signature issues in the 2000s, before his brother President George W. Bush took “reforms” like the No Child Left Behind Act to the White House. DeSantis’s predecessor, Rick Scott, now the state’s junior senator, also expanded charter schools and voucher programs while chipping away at long-term contracts for teachers. But DeSantis has not only built on his predecessors’ devotion to privatization and exploitative salaries, he has also squelched teaching, learning, and productive dialogues on American history, race, and gender.

The teacher shortages exhaust the remaining educators, and buttress DeSantis’ conservative takeover of public-school curriculums by whittling down institutional resistance to his culture-war inspired edicts. Educators are “frustrated to the point where they don’t have a sense of hope anymore,” said Steve Frazier, Executive Director of the Florida League of Middle Schools, who worked as a teacher and principal in Broward County for over three decades. “It’s like anything, you keep getting beat down, eventually you just wave the white flag and say I can’t do it anymore.”

Tawanda Carter, a literacy coach in Broward County for 23 years, took a classroom position this year because of the shortages. To support her students in the long run, Carter realized that she must pick and choose her battles to avoid burnout, especially when a parent objects to certain topics like learning about the experiences of other racial and ethnic groups. “At the end of the day, I recognize in myself and others that you just do what you can do,” she says.

Teacher vacancies also give DeSantis and Florida state lawmakers an opportunity to seed schools with instructors whom they believe would be more amenable to far-right positions. Under Florida’s Military Veterans Certification Pathway program, which came into effect on July 1 of last year, veterans with at least four years of service, an honorable or medical discharge, 60 college credits, and a minimum 2.5 GPA can apply for a temporary teaching certificate after passing a subject-area exam of their choice.

Florida teachers should have the leeway to design appropriate lesson plans for their students and not be shackled to politically imposed curriculums…

New teachers hired under the program are assigned a mentor teacher for at least two years, and will have five years to fulfill the requirements for permanent certification, including obtaining a bachelor’s degree. Many experienced educators worry that the program will not help fill vacancies but instead lower the standards for people entering the profession. DeSantis has also proposed offering bonuses to veterans and retired first responders who agree to teach full-time for at least two years. Such recruitment drives are a disservice to veterans and first responders seeking second careers, as well as to current students and teachers. The state has processed hundreds of applications, but only twelve veterans have been hired so far, the Florida Department of Education told the Prospect.

Herman Bennett, a historian of the African diaspora at the City University of New York, helped the College Board draft the African American Studies AP curriculum. He says the Florida moves remind him that fifty years ago a teacher’s credentials were irrelevant for some schools. “It’s reminiscent of what history teaching once was in my generation, there was the idea that the historian could be the football coach,” he says. “Because it really didn’t matter. You could have a knucklehead who was responsible for the civics course.”

For Bennett, DeSantis’s rejection of the College Board’s African American studies course signals the debasing of teaching and learning loud and clear. “If the AP course was simply Black names, dates and facts, DeSantis wouldn’t have a concern about it because that would just produce an inert and passive citizen.” Bennett said. “Afro-American studies demonstrate that there are histories of struggle, and if you don’t have those understandings, then you see the possibility of change as limited.”

With the College Board caving into DeSantis’s demands, the state’s educators can only do so much to get around these obstacles. By removing African American and other racial, ethnic, and gender studies topics from public school curriculums, and diluting discussions of contemporary issues like Black Lives Matter, another Republican governor is once again trying to export new limitations on learning across the country. Florida teachers should have the leeway to design appropriate lesson plans for their students and not be shackled to politically imposed curriculums. Stifling creativity in classroom instruction ultimately means that teachers can only teach exactly what they are told to teach and nothing more—if they decide to stay in the profession at all

https://prospect.org/education/02-22-2023-desantis-education-teacher-vacancies/

#Caturday
#Floridateacher
#Hope_On_The_Street
#WomensHistoryMonth
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