The Anoka-Hennepin teachers’ union has given a qualified blessing to the district’s proposed replacement for its controversial Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy.

On Monday afternoon, members of the union’s governing body, representing all of the district’s 65 sites, voted to endorse the Respectful Learning Environment Curriculum Policy. The policy is set to go to a school board vote Feb. 13.

“People said this seems to reflect what we know works for our students,” said union president Julie Blaha. “We do appreciate that the board took our suggestions seriously and we see a lot of them in here.”

The draft is the second to go before the board in recent months. The Controversial Topics Curriculum Policy, introduced in December, was scrapped last month amid widespread opposition.

The newest draft codifies an expectation that educators do not attempt to persuade students to adopt or reject a certain stance on political, religious, social or economic issues. It would replace one that requires staff to remain neutral on issues of sexual orientation. Teachers have said the current rule, commonly called the neutrality policy, left many unclear how they should interact with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. It also is at the center of a lawsuit filed against the district last summer on behalf of six current and former students who said the district did not adequately respond to their reports of persistent bullying based on their actual or perceived sexual orientation.

Read the rest of this article Star Tribune

February 7, 2012, 12:17 a.m.

L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy seeks to assure angry parents, who demonstrated at campus over allegations against two teachers. Officials say no other instructors are under suspicion.

In a dramatic move to quell parents’ fears, Los Angeles school officials said they will temporarily replace the entire staff of an elementary school south of downtown Los Angeles, where two teachers have been accused of lewd acts against students.

Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. John Deasy announced the action at a tense public meeting Monday evening in which Miramonte Elementary School parents chanted “cover-up!” and accused the school system of failing to protect their children.

Some parents said they were alarmed by reports that students had complained about one of the accused teachers several times in the last two decades.

“My trust level is at zero,” Cassini Quarles, the mother of a third-grader, said outside the meeting, which was held at a nearby high school.

The staffing shake-up marks an attempt to rebuild community confidence as detectives and school officials continue their investigations.

More than a quarter of the students enrolled at Miramonte didn’t show up Monday as parents kept them home. On Monday night, some parents applauded the removal of the school’s staff as a good first step.

Officials emphasized that no other educators at the school are under suspicion but that a bold act was needed to help remove the cloud over Miramonte.

Read the rest of this article at LA Times

February 1, 2012
By Kremena Spengler – Staff Writer , The Journal

NEW ULM – An alarming game played at Washington Elementary School has set off a storm of reaction.

“Speculation” has spread on Facebook about a game called “rape tag.”

It is described as similar to freeze tag, except it apparently involves “hip thrusts” to unfreeze a person.

A parent called Washington Principal Bill Sprung on Jan. 9 to notify him that the game was being played by fifth-graders at the school, Sprung said Tuesday night.

Some 15-20 students from two fifth-grade sections were involved in the game, said Sprung.

Sprung said he immediately notified fifth-grade teachers, who quickly addressed the matter with their classes. Sprung also notified recess supervisors.

Read the rest of this article at: nujournal.com

A good opportunity to talk to the kids about… you know

February 3, 2012
By The Journal

There’s has probably never been greater statewide coverage of kids’ playground games than this week, when news spread about the games of “rape tag” some kids have been playing at Washington School. The name itself was enough to make a TV news director drool.

The name is also enough to set off parents, and rightly so. Rape is not something parents of fifth and sixth graders want their kids to know anything about. But in today’s society, where music and entertainment are more and more sexualized, it is hard for kids not to get some exposure to all kinds of things way too early.

Which makes this a good opportunity for parents to bring up the subject with their kids. We suspect a lot of parents put off having the “big talk” about sex with their kids not because the kids aren’t ready, but because the parents aren’t ready.

Read the rest of this article at: nujournal.com

A former elementary school teacher in Los Angeles has been arrested for allegedly molesting nearly two dozen children after photos of students posed in bondage positions were passed to the Sheriff’s Department.

Mark Berndt, 61, a teacher with over 30 years experience at Miramonte Elementary School in south Los Angeles, is charged with molesting 23 children, according to a statement from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Police began the investigation after a photo processing facility passed along suspicious images depicting students blindfolded with their mouths covered in tape. Female students were depicted with a blue plastic spoon containing “an unknown clear/white liquid” in front of their mouths, while other students were pictured with live cockroaches on their faces. In some photos, Berndt had his arm around the children or his hand over their mouths.

Police found the spoon, along with an empty container in the trash in Berndt’s classroom and, through DNA testing, determined that both contained Berndt’s semen.

The students were between the ages of 7 and 10 years old when the alleged crimes occurred, police said.

Authorities launched a widespread sex crime investigation, interviewing current and former students and school employees and searching Berndt’s home. They recovered a total of 390 photographs and an adult “sexual bondage” film which mirrored the photos of the children, according to a statement by the sheriff’s department today.

Read the rest of the article Here

Washington Examiner columnist Mark Tapscott explains why this is a much bigger story than the media will let on:

You will recall that ACORN and other Democratic satellites organized a campaign a couple of years back to install their allies in Secretary of State offices in as many key states as possible. Such officials are responsible for enforcing – or not enforcing – state election laws.

Being a Republican, Schultz represented an obstacle to the plan. Could that be why Edwards sought to, according to the Des Moines Register, falsify Schultz identity in an effort to implicate him in a scandal that would result in his possible removal from office or defeat in the next election?

For more information you can go to Washington Examiner and various news outlets  – We provide – You decide.

Internal Revenue Service data show that 3 percent of Senate staffers and more than 4 percent of House staffers owed taxes in 2010, adding up to about $10.6 million in unpaid taxes. More than 98,000 civilian federal employees were delinquent on their taxes in 2010, adding up to more than $1 billion in taxes owed, according to the IRS.

Gender free schools: http://americanvisionnews.com/946/gender-free-children-coming-to-a-public-school-near-you

Don’t forget CA has gender neutral bathrooms as well.

Gender free bathrooms: http://www.bazeley.net/mosaic/news/archives/news/demand_growing_for_genderneutral_restrooms_at_workplaces_and_campuses.html

GLBT support of gender free bathrooms http://www.chancesdances.org/gender-neutral-bathrooms

Gender-free children: coming to a public school near you

by Joel McDurmon on Dec 31, 2011

From Chalcedon.edu:

Coming soon, to a public school near you: the teaching that “gender is a spectrum,” and “gender identity” a state of mind, a social construct-and it’s all part of a top-down campaign to convince your children that they can be “whoever they want to be.” Boys can be girls and girls can be boys.

In March, 2010, the National Education Association, America’s biggest and most powerful teachers’ union, sent a delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women to testify to the need for all the world’s national governments to embark on a program of radical sex education in their public schools. To quote from a contemporary news report:

Comprehensive sex education is “the only way to combat heterosexism and gender conformity,” [NEA delegate Diane] Schneider proclaimed, “and we must make these issues a part of every middle and high-school student’s agenda.” “Gender identity expression and sexual orientation are a spectrum,” she explained, and said that those opposed to homosexuality “are stuck in a binary box that religion and family create.”

In April the Council of Europe announced that it would soon “finalize a new convention that defines ‘gender’ as a social construct rather than as a distinctive grounded in biology.”

Yes, it’s coming right down from the top.

It’s by no means limited to Canada and Europe:

the campaign to create “gender-free” children has already begun in the United States. The Redwood Heights Elementary School in Oakland, California, has already installed a “gender coach” in the classroom to teach very young children that “you can be a boy or a girl, or both.” Don’t take our word for it:

to read the full report.

Can We Please Just Start Admitting That We Do Actually Want To Indoctrinate Kids?

In response to New York’s recently introduced marriage equality bill, the so-called National Organization for Marriage got a bunch of pictures of black people and some guy who sounds like Foghorn Leghorn to repeat the same lies about indoctrinating schoolchildren that they ran in 2009. They accuse us of exploiting children and in response we say, “NOOO! We’re not gonna make kids learn about homosexuality, we swear! It’s not like we’re trying to recruit your children or anything.” But let’s face it—that’s a lie. We want educators to teach future generations of children to accept queer sexuality. In fact, our very future depends on it.

Link http://www.queerty.com/can-we-please-just-start-admitting-that-we-do-actually-want-to-indoctrinate-kids-20110512/

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution specifies that it is the Congress that has the power to declare war.  United States Code (50 U.S.C. 1541-1548), the War Powers Act, specifically states that the president may undertake the use of military force only in the case of “… a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”  It further states that the President must consult with Congress, “…in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities …”

United Nations Membership does not grant the Security Council authority to order U.S. forces into action. A U.S. President is not allowed to violate the Constitution and the Law, to commit an act of war without the authorization of the People, through their Congressonal Representative