It’s a news story about a student in Oklahoma who was suspended for – are you ready for this? – witchcraft. Yes, a school actually suspended a student because the assistant principal believes this girl cast a spell on a teacher to make him sick.
Every time I go to the religioustolerance.org website, I find yet another religious nut in the school system trying to violate the separation of church and state, even though they have never won a single court case. This, however, is the last straw.
I am not blaming religion for these insanities, because I have personally seen many Christian and other religious people who are just as against this sort of thing as I am. No, religion is not the enemy. School boards are. Every single time this sort of thing happens, it’s the work of a principal or a school board. No matter how many times the courts rule against them, they insist on spending millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to resist lawsuits instead of on school books. I think that simply ruling against them in court is not enough. If a school board keeps doing this crap again and again, they should be punished. Jerks like this should no longer be allowed to keep their positions of authority. It’s about time those would-be dictators learned that the law does apply to them, too. Since they haven’t learned the easy way, they should learn the hard way. What do you think?
Well, I disagree that school boards are in general the enemy, although in some cases they are. In this situation, I saw no mention of the school board, only the assistant principal. And I think that he should lose his job and face criminal charges of abuse of power.
I know the school board wasn’t directly responsible in the situation I mentioned, but they are apparently either directly or indirectly approving of the assistant principal’s actions by putting up the money and the lawyers to fight the parent’s lawsuit. My point is that school boards and principals believe that they live in their own little world where they are the supreme authority and need answer to no one, and in many cases, this is de facto true. This needs to change. These people cannot be allowed to openly defy the law with impunity time and time again.
By the way, is there really such a thing as a criminal charge for “abuse of power”? If so, how does it work?
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I see that the specific issue of the “witch suspension” has come up. That doesn’t invalidate the fact that this is only one in an long line of religiously motivated idiocies that local school administrations have perpetrated. The point of my original post is that school boards in today’s society are perfectly free to institute these idiotic and illegal policies again and again with no reprecussions for their actions. This is not acceptable. A school administration that willfully and repeatedly violates the Constitution, despite the hundreds of similar cases that have been resisted and lost, should be removed from office and prohibited from holding school authority ever again.
Heh ive been saying that all along, but thats just because im a studen’t and I realise just how useless and bad they are. I think a better example of how bad school boards are would be where the one school board built a residental area over a toxic waste dump.
All that we know was that a girl was suspended. She claims it was because of her religon, or what was her appernet religion. This is her side of the story.
The school board absolutely cannot comment on the case, even concerning factual matters. This is to protect students. It is still entirely possible that major facts have been left out of this entire process.
I am not saying that it did happen, but it is possible that this girl also did something to threaten the teacher in question, etc., and that she was actually disruptive to the educational environment of that school. We just do not know all of the facts yet.
Principals and school administrators are hired employees of the school districts. The School Boards are the elected officials who oversee those employees and their actions.
School Board meetings are held in public. the Public has a right to comment during the meetings. this is the public “oversite” feature for administering public school dollars.
If the “school boards” are really the ‘enemy’, then, they are the enemy that was elected by a plurality of the voting public.
Without School Boards, school administrators are free to administer their rules in private.
I have unfortunately had the opportunity to see multiple school boards in action up close and personal. Amazingly, most board members when approached individually seem to be intelligent and even charming. Put them together on a school board with power to act, and they degenerate into malevolent fools.
Lowlights in my experience: the board member who supported new high school construction because it would help football team morale and lead to more wins, the Indianapolis board that brought in high-priced consultants to advise on needed school closings, then ignored their advice and provoked a racial conflict by targeting black high schools for shutdown, and the board candidate asked about the need for corporal punishment in schools who ringingly announced “Whatever it takes!” in front of a hundred people (then denied it later).
There is a fatal miasma hanging over school boards (and administrators) that prevents the application of common sense.
I think the problem with school boards are that in general they have low pay and strange hours so the only people who want to be on school boards are those who are in it for the power. Since interest in school board elections is low they only need to appeal to a small section of the public. This is a perfect setup for demagouges. However if you are disappointed in your board you can go to the meetings and raise cain.
