Classes will stop region wide and throughout the nation Tuesday morning, as school officials give students a chance to watch the historic swearing in of Barack Obama, our first African American president. Except down in Federal Way, where kids will have to find something else to do unless they bring in a signed permission form from their parents.
Hell… I’m all for parental control and participation, but I can’t really imagine a good reason for a parent to deny permission for their child to watch history in action, and I can’t imagine a good reason for a school district to give parents that option. But then, this is Federal Way, the same school district that imposed a moratorium on the showing of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth .
Forget Obama… it’s time to inaugurate a new Federal Way school board.
The UW is behaving in a similar way. I had to “sell” the inaug as a seminar in order to get it scheduled. Darryl will speak!
I just clicked Goldy’s “signed permission form” link, which accesses a KING5.com article, and nowhere in the article does it say that this was a decision by the Federal Way school board. It does mention this employee who is quoted below.
“There is no big deal. The goal is to once again build partnerships, keep parents informed. Say ‘Hey. This is your child. Your education.’ We think it’s a great opportunity. We’re going to afford the kids that opportunity, but we want the parents to make that call,” said Dr. Joshua Joseph Garcia, Federal Way’s Executive Director of Teaching for Learning.
The concern is that the televised inauguration was not listed in syllabus handed out at the beginning of the term. The district considers the inauguration a full length documentary, unlike some newspaper or internet reference articles which do not require pre-approval.”
We are entering a sunspot cycle called a Maunderminium. It happens every 300 years or so. The last documented cycle was in the 1600’s…prior to that, the 1300’s. It cools the Earth. The Pacific Northwest will have years of weather like this past year. It has zero to do with man. This is what we should be discussing….not semi-fiction by an idiot.
PS–
Day 9 in Southern California. Still looking for a cloud. High around 80…again.
Must be Global Warming, right?
Work hard & invest right…instead of bitching about silly shit like Al Gorbasm’s BS.
I sort of agree.
How dare you force a liberal agenda onto the kids?
If you are a right wing fanatic, you don’t want your child exposed to a new non bush president, you want to minimize their exposure to challenging or new ideas. They could listen to Rush Limbaugh instead during that time, and be assured of getting nothing that would change their world view.
Seriously, That would be like having my kid forced through the school to attend a several hour event about the pope or Fred Phelps.
I don’t have a problem with them asking.
@2: I will try to write SLOWLY for Troll:
The principles got an E-mail about this directive – where do you think it came from?
Why would students need
to watch the inauguration in a class? It is not as if this is some porn or some controversial book or inappropraite movie. This is a stupid, unnecessary, beaurocratic overload with possible political ramifications.
The excuses above don’t hold water.
@5
I agree. How dare Dr. Joshua Joseph Garcia, Federal Way’s Executive Director of Teaching for Learning want to “build partnerships” and “keep parents informed.”
What does he know about education, anyway?
Any community that would attract the likes of Jonathan Gardner and Frosty Hardison is, shall we say, interesting.
Were they opposing Gore’s inconvenience or just the truth?
Maybe both.
Whenever Mr. C makes an appearance I’m reminded of this Republican KLOWN:
http://www.politico.com/news/s.....17506.html
Steve King, right wing twit! An abominable embarrassment to the great state of Iowa.
@2 Troll, the school board was directly involved in muzzling ‘Inconvenient Truth,’ and while their meddling fingerprints may not be on this one — yet — nevertheless they are responsible for supervising the administrators they hire. The school board could stop this nonsense in 5 minutes if they wanted to. The fact they haven’t says they don’t want to. And do you think for 5 seconds this administrator would be working there, much less have made a decision like this, if he wasn’t in sync with the mentality of the school board? As always, you are a fool and an idiot.
@3 I’m interested in your scientific theory about how humanity can spew trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere with absolutely no physical effects whatsoever. Could you explain that?
@6 So now public schools are a democracy where parents get to vote on what their kids are taught? What happened to the concept of hiring trained professionals to do things that are over untrained people’s heads? Are you endorsing the concept of community micromanagement of public school curricula? Should parents get to vote on whether the earth is spherical or flat? Or whether 2 + 2 = 4, or some other number? What do you think of applying this principle to surgery and firefighting, too? You are a fucking idiot.
That’s a great civics lesson Federal Way Schools are teaching their kids: You don’t get to hear what your country’s new president has to say unless your parents agree in writing not to censor it. What I want to know is, did the Federal Way Schools do this in 2004 when Bush was sworn in?
But I’ll tell you one thing. No matter what the intent behind this policy is, it looks and smells racist.
Man, am I having trouble with Goldy’s edit function this morning. It doesn’t work, period. I quit. I’m just going to repost that comment.
I never considered the racist angle.
I just assumed the school board was scared of exposing the kids to liberal ideas.
Or enough parents were afraid of their kids being exposed to liberal ideas and contacted the school.
That’s a great civics lesson Federal Way Schools are teaching the kids: You don’t get to hear what your country’s new president has to say unless your parents agree in writing not to censor it. What I want to know is, did the Federal Way Schools do this in 2004 when Bush was sworn in?
But I’ll tell you one thing. No matter what the intent behind this policy is, it looks and smells racist, and that’s how the district’s minority students are going to interpret it.
The Federal Way School District has just lost its last shred of credibility. This should knock $200,000 off the market value of any home within the district boundaries. The only way I would raise a family in that school district is if someone paid for private school tuition for my kids and compensated me for the diminished resale value of the house. And even then, I wouldn’t want to live there, because I don’t want those rednecks as neighbors.
I well remember watching the inaugeration of Richard Nixon on TV in class, in 1968 and again in 1972. I also remember watching every major event in the U.S. space program – every Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launch, spacewalk, landing and recovery, etc. Nobody even thought to ask for parent’s permission – it was considered part of our education.
I grew up in the South, but since moving out here I’ve been really impressed by how extreme the Wingnuts are out here. In this case, the school district automatically assumes that there are people who are so opposed to Obama that they are afraid their children might be contaminated by the mere vision and and audio of his inaugeration.
@17 Both the UW and Fed Way SD ought to be ashamed.
All of us, red and blue, white and black, have a huge stake in this event. It should be automatic to give our fellow Americans the opportunity to watch and participate in the single most important act of our democracy.
I wonder what sorts of bigotry we have yet to find under these rocks.
This is sarcasm by the way:
They didn’t apply the same criteria for bush, cuz he was a “reel amuricun.”
Another way of thinking about it, now that it’s forbidden fruit, the thing the parents don’t want their kids to see, it’s going to be the thing they have to go see…
It looks like the Federal Way School District came up with its class schedules long before the presidential election result was decided. It has been known for quite some time that a new president would be inaugurated on January 20, 2009, but not necessarily whom. The 2008-09 class schedule would have been developed some time prior to the start of the school year in September 2008.
So if John McCain had been elected, instead of Barack Obama, and the Federal Way School District likewise did not have the inauguration on the class schedules, would anyone be complaining if they did not allow students the opportunity to listen to McCain’s speech during class hours?
But Federal Way isn’t even denying students the chance to see the inauguration. If students want to miss class and see the speech, they can get their parental permission to do so.
Arguably, it would have been wiser for Federal Way to schedule the inauguration as part of the class schedules well in advance. Evidently, no one complained about the lack of the speech when the class schedules were distributed many months ago.
But if Federal Way had done this, and McCain had turned out to be the speaker, someone would complain that Federal Way students were being forced to listen to Republican propaganda. And if Federal Way had allowed students to miss the McCain speech with signed parental permission, they would be ridiculed for this as well.
And I am equally certain that there will be a lot of conservative parents in other school districts complaining that their children are being forced to listen to the Obama speech.
@20
I’m also supprised they didn’t have this on the class schedule, it isn’t like inaugurations don’t happen every 4 years.
I wouldn’t have any problem with a school district showing its students the inauguration of a Republican. I consider it basic civics and a part of learning about our system of government.
@20 No other school district has a policy similar to Federal Way’s, Richard. Why don’t they just do what all the other school districts are doing? What’s so hard about that?
Does anyone know if the Federal Way School District allowed their students to watch Bush’s inaugurals without parental permission?
It really doesn’t matter. This is a stupid thing to argue about. Most kids will be bored watching the inauguration no matter if it’s an African American or the head of the KKK. That’s because kids are often smarter than adults and can see through all the bullshit. Blah blah blah historic schmistoric. Where’s the payoff? In the end, Obama is just another boring politician.
5yUDPi hi! how you doin?