[talaniman]

Could monitoring and correcting the behavior of bullies be a possible answer? Not just in the bathroom and showers, but in school in general? Bullying and invasions of privacy has actually contributed to death in teens and college kids.

I think a country that can make adjustments for the handicapped can certainly make adjustments for gender identity. If not physically then socially. You can't just leave it at there is no problem because you have no solution because you don't consider it's a problem, because clearly it is to some.

Hell just redesign the damn bathrooms to afford individual privacy, and safety. Everybody else does. As I said before, you stand in line in trains, busses and planes.

[speechlesstx]

Women's bathrooms don't have showers. There are individual cubicles, and we have no idea what someone is doing in the next cubicle (except maybe talking on her cell phone).

The Massachusetts example, probably Kalifornia also, includes locker rooms and showers.

[Wondergirl]

The Massachusetts example, probably Kalifornia also, includes locker rooms and showers.

98% of public women's washrooms don't have locker rooms or showers. We're lucky if the sinks are clean (with no long black hairs clogging the drain) and there are paper towel available.

[speechlesstx]

98% of public women's washrooms don't have locker rooms or showers. We're lucky if the sinks are clean (with no long black hairs clogging the drain) and there are paper towel available.

Wondergirl, I am familiar with what's in the typical women's restroom. As I said, the Massachusetts example, probably Kalifornia also, includes locker rooms and showers (and sports) - in addition to restrooms.

February 19, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Massachusetts Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester has issued orders to the state's K-12 public schools requiring them to permit “transgender” boys and girls to use the opposite sex's locker rooms, bathrooms, and changing facilities as long as they claim to identify with that gender.

Many elementary schools in smaller Massachusetts towns include children from kindergarten through eighth grade, making it possible for boys as old as 14 to share toilet facilities with girls as young as five.

Under Chester's leadership, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) released an 11-page document on Friday outlining this and other new guidelines giving “transgender” students special status and privileges in Massachusetts schools. Some family advocates are calling the document, which was prepared with assistance from homosexual and transgender advocacy groups, “the most thorough, invasive, and radical transgender initiative ever seen on a statewide level.”

The policy does not require a doctor's note or even parental permission for a child to switch sexes in the eyes of Massachusetts schools. Only the student's word is needed: If a boy says he's a girl, as far as the schools are concerned, he's a girl.

“The responsibility for determining a student's gender identity rests with the student,” the statement says. “A school should accept a student's assertion of his or her gender identity when there is … 'evidence that the gender-related identity is sincerely held as part of a person's core identity.'” That evidence, according to the document, can be as simple as a statement given by a friend.

That means, according to the newly issued school policies, that boys who say they identify as girls must be addressed by the feminine pronoun and be listed as girls on official transcripts.

They must also be allowed access to girls' facilities and be allowed to play on girls' athletic and club teams. The same is true for girls who say they are boys.

You foresee no problems with this? What do they do at a restaurant, a church, Home Depot? I know, before you know it the left will demand everyone including churches comply with this nonsense.

[Wondergirl]

Wondergirl, I am familiar with what's in the typical women's restroom.

Wow! That's scary!

You foresee no problems with this?

Transgender -- "as long as they claim to identify with that gender."

And that means what? Self report only? Doctors' releases after a great deal of psychological testing? The first part would bother me. Testimony from a friend doesn't work for me.

[speechlesstx]

Wow! That's scary!

Um, you think they're all designed, built and maintained by women? I cleaned restrooms at my first job and have been in the construction industry for the past twenty years. And comments like that are what leads me to respond to you with snark and sarcasm, I thought we had called a truce on that.

Transgender -- "as long as they claim to identify with that gender."

Exactly, any kid can claim anything.

[Wondergirl]

Um, you think they're all designed, built and maintained by women? I cleaned restrooms at my first job and have been in the construction industry for the past twenty years. And comments like that are what leads me to respond to you with snark and sarcasm, I thought we had called a truce on that.

I was trying to be funny. And I actually LIKE you.

Exactly, any kid can claim anything.

Nope. I'm with you on that one. (Did I actually write that?? )

[speechlesstx]

Back to the problem with public schools... and this whole "inclusiveness" bullsh*t.

A Pulpit for Bullies

By Anthony Esolen - August 14, 2013

To campaign against the bullying of LGBT people as if disagreement with the gay lifestyle were an evil is itself a form of bullying.

On June 19, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan ruled in favor of a high school student named Daniel Glowacki, who had charged that his high school teacher, Jay McDowell, had violated his constitutional right to freedom of speech. He was granted one dollar in compensation. The court’s verdict, in vulgar terms, was that the pig had the right to say what he said.

The facts, according to the court’s judgment, are these.

On October 20, 2011, the Gay Straight Alliance at Howell High School planned to take part in a national “campaign aimed at raising awareness of the bullying of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youth.” The court acknowledges that the day is also called “Spirit Day,” which, the plaintiffs contended, is so-called to foster acceptance in the public schools of the homosexual lifestyle. The Gay Straight Alliance made up flyers to be posted all around the school, urging students to wear purple on that day as a sign of their solidarity with homosexual teenagers. The principal approved the flyer.

Wendy Hiller, one of the teachers, printed a batch of purple T-shirts, reading “Tyler’s Army” on the front and “Fighting Evil with Kindness” on the back. She had, in the past, worn a black shirt reading “Tyler’s Army.” The name refers to Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers who took his own life after his roommate had secretly filmed him in a homosexual encounter. Hiller, says the court, in evident agreement, did not believe that the shirts would be controversial, since the topic was bullying and not homosexuality. Hiller sold some of the shirts to other teachers at cost.

Jay McDowell, an economics teacher, bought one of those shirts and wore it in class that day. McDowell then showed his students a video about a gay teenager who committed suicide, and devoted the rest of the class period to discussion.

Daniel entered McDowell’s classroom for the sixth period that day. McDowell noticed that one of the girls in class was wearing a belt buckle with the Confederate flag. He ordered her to take it off, because it offended him. Daniel then asked the obvious question. Why should it be all right for so many students and teachers to wear the purple T-shirts, but not all right for the girl to wear the belt buckle?

Consider the great difference here in boldness and specificity and intention. The belt buckle expresses a feeling of pride or affection for the American South. It is small. It does not demand to be noticed and read. It does not say anything. It is not a part of a school-wide campaign. It is not as if the student, together with others throughout the school, wore it on her shirt, with the words, “The South shall rise again.” It is also a private thing; she is just one student.

McDowell then, predictably, told Glowacki that the Confederate flag was a symbol of hateful things, like “the slashing and hanging of [African Americans].” It was discriminatory against blacks. Glowacki responded that the purple T-shirts were discriminatory against Catholics. This prompted a heated exchange. The young man is no theologian, and the teacher no moral philosopher. McDowell says that he told Glowacki that it was all right if his religion said that homosexual behavior was wrong, but that Glowacki could not say that in class. He also says, missing the illogic and the aggressiveness of his statement, that he told Glowacki that to say “I don’t accept gays” is like saying “I don’t accept blacks.” When Glowacki replied, “I don’t accept gays,” McDowell threw him out and began disciplinary action against him.

The parents complained, and McDowell was issued a reprimand: “You disciplined two students for holding and stating personal beliefs, to which you disagree. You disciplined them in anger under the guise of harassment and bullying because you opposed their religious belief and were offended by it. The students were causing no disruption.” Indeed, the reprimand specifically states that McDowell attempted to get Daniel to “recant,” and notes the irony that this should occur on a day devoted to fighting bullies.

What happened to Daniel after that is instructive, and does not enter the court’s opinion, though it easily might have, since it provides abundant evidence for the plaintiff’s contention that the Anti-Bullying Day was really a Pro-Gay Day, and that Jay McDowell was himself a bully. McDowell went on television claiming that Glowacki had entered the classroom spewing epithets against gays—a claim which, if true, the court would certainly have seized upon. Glowacki was (and continues to be) vilified across the nation. The lesbian Ellen DeGeneres featured a gay student on her television show who testified for McDowell in the disciplinary hearings.

There are two points I wish to make. The first is that the superintendent’s ironical insight did not go nearly far enough—the bullying was not limited to that incident in the classroom. The second is that the state is acting as a church, engaged in catechesis. The superintendent was correct; no student should be constrained to make an auto da fé. Those confessions, rather, ought to be procured over years of badgering, cajoling, wheedling, insinuating, urging, tempting, persuading, ridiculing, debating, by all means fair and foul, so long as the façade of “objectivity” and religious “neutrality” and “respect” for the students—but never for the parents!—be maintained.

On the bullying: the students know that what is going on here is the advocacy of homosexual activity. Many people are bullied, for all kinds of reasons—for being fat, or stupid, or poor, or ugly. If the school wishes to teach gallantry and kindness, why not do so with as broad a sweep as possible? But the teachers and students chose Tyler Clementi as their cause célèbre.

Homosexual activists do not say that Clementi was merely the victim of a nasty roommate. Their point—as the students at Howell High School no doubt were made well aware—is that Clementi was the victim of a general disapproval of his behavior. That is, any disapproval of the homosexual life is to be construed as homophobic, without regard to reasons or persons. That is precisely the message conveyed by the purple T-shirts.

The message may be unfolded thus. If you do not wear this shirt, or if you do not approve of the life it celebrates, you are evil. You’re a bully. You want people like Tyler Clementi to die. The superintendent, but not the court, notes that Glowacki was held up to opprobrium in the classroom.

Neither the superintendent nor the court expresses any concern about the massive contradiction that McDowell could order a student to remove a belt buckle because it might create a hostile environment for some other students, while not noticing that the entire school bristles with hostility against Catholics, evangelical Protestants, orthodox Jews, and anybody else who holds that sexual intercourse is to be bound within marriage, between a man and a woman.

Which brings me to my second point. If I hire a man to teach my son economics, I’d be shocked to learn that he’d been using his position to run down my faith. Granted that students, because of their age and the special circumstances, do not possess complete freedom of expression in school, it is equally true that teachers and schools must not capitalize upon their strength, their numbers, and their separation from the home, to advocate what is essentially a religion, with its (peculiar and incoherent) set of universal demands and condemnations.

Suppose it were not a Confederate belt buckle that McDowell had ordered removed, but a placard reading “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” That commandment—nowadays not controversial, though we obey it no better than any generation ever has—would be proscribed, as “religious” speech. But “thou shalt not disapprove publicly of the homosexual lifestyle,” which is what “Tyler’s Army” means, and in an aggressive and accusatory way, with the aim of silencing those who might disagree, and humiliating those who might express that disagreement—that is plastered all over the school and on the bodies of the teachers themselves, the masters, whom the students are supposed to respect or at least tolerate, since their future in part rests in those teachers’ hands.

What gives these schools the right to engage in that catechesis? The business of the public school is akin to the business of a group of tutors hired by a group of parents. It has become, instead, the business of a group of self-imagined forward-thinking missionaries introducing students to their new and enlightened world, against the supposed inertia and ignorance of parents, pastors, and the great majority of moral philosophers and theologians older than yesterday.

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence Rhode Island, and the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Ironies of Faith. He has translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

Read more: A Pulpit for Bullies | RealClearPolitics
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[speechlesstx]

I was trying to be funny. And I actually LIKE you.

Nope. I'm with you on that one. (Did I actually write that????)

That's better :)

[Wondergirl]

Back to the problem with public schools...and this whole "inclusiveness" bullsh*t.

If you were the teacher and a kid showed up wearing a buckle featuring the Confederate flag, what would you do?

If bullying is going on in your line of vision, what would you do?

[speechlesstx]

If you were the teacher and a kid showed up wearing a buckle featuring the Confederate flag, what would you do?

Say "nice buckle?"

If bullying is going on in your line of vision, what would you do?

I would do what Daniel Glowacki did, stand up to the bully - ESPECIALLY if it's a teacher.

[Wondergirl]

Say "nice buckle?"

I'd turn it into positive teaching moment.

I would do what Daniel Glowacki did, stand up to the bully - ESPECIALLY if it's a teacher.

Whoever is doing the bullying, I would stop it instantly and also turn that into a positive teaching moment. If it's another teacher, that person would get reported.

[cdad]

I think a country that can make adjustments for the handicapped can certainly make adjustments for gender identity. If not physically then socially. You can't just leave it at there is no problem because you have no solution because you don't consider its a problem, because clearly it is to some.

Hell just redesign the damn bathrooms to afford individual privacy, and safety. Everybody else does. As I said before, you stand in line in trains, busses and planes.

So if a student wishs to do as the other students then there should be no limits right? What about the blind student that wants to drive a car and the school offers drivers ed ? Should we allow it? Under your rules it seems we should.

When making boundries there is a bellcurve to what is normal. If someone that is transgender isn't "normal" then accomedations like the teachers bathroom or one at the school nurses office should be allowed. I have no idea why you would want a naked male to be in a room full of impressionable young girls. Is it so wrong to teach your child not to hit women? By your standards that is the wrong thing to be teaching them or will it depend on if they are transgender or not? In a world without lines and boundries the anything goes attitude will expand into areas you might not want to go.

[talaniman]

First off dad, don't subscribe me to your extreme fear theories. Second adjustments is not going over certain boundaries but those have to be set by the school, both parents and school officials, but the idea that nothing should be done at all is unacceptable and smacks of denial through the worse case scenario disturbingly similar to allowing gay marriage leads to bestiality.

And its not the wishes of the students to consider, but those of the parents and that's the missing ingredient to making good adjustments that benefit all concerned. Can't we have solution that preserves dignity and self respect of all the citizens? Accommodations on both sides have to be required. I am no crazy extremist and using the john is an important human function. Showers... we need to talk about.

[teacherjenn4]

I'm going to brag about my school. If you remember, this is a public school with a hands-on approach. We just received our test scores : 83% passed Language Arts and 89% passed Math. Not bad :)

[cdad]

I'm going to brag about my school. If you remember, this is a public school with a hands-on approach. We just received our test scores : 83% passed Language Arts and 89% passed Math. Not bad :)

Congrats jenn. Now if you wouldn't mind can you explain this new law and how it applies to the school system ?

[teacherjenn4]

Congrats jenn. Now if you wouldnt mind can you explain this new law and how it applies to the school system ?

Common Core is a set of standards that most states will use, although some have opted out. If used correctly, the lessons should hold each teacher and school district accountable. Basically, you have the students figure out where the answer comes from and work together to form opinions and answers. We teach this way already at our school.

[talaniman]

TJ, If I can ask about class size, what's the curriculum, including any extra curricular activities, parental involvement, meal program after, and before school programs, teacher support systems and most important the average income for the students parents. Do you have individual counseling and tutoring or special needs program, and program for at risk students. I would just love to pick your brain for things that could work elsewhere.

[speechlesstx]

I'd turn it into positive teaching moment.

Whoever is doing the bullying, I would stop it instantly and also turn that into a positive teaching moment. If it's another teacher, that person would get reported.

Positive teaching moments are subjective. This teacher I'm sure thought he was giving a positive teaching moment by telling Daniel his beliefs were unacceptable. That's not his place, his place is to teach the subject, not his values.

[Wondergirl]

Positive teaching moments are subjective. This teacher I'm sure thought he was giving a positive teaching moment by telling Daniel his beliefs were unacceptable. That's not his place, his place is to teach the subject, not his values.

If there is an "un," it's not positive.

Guess I'm going to get out there and show how to teach positively.