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Uvalde victims’ loved ones plead for answers from City Council as school district police chief a no-show yet again

by www.chron.com Leave a Comment

Parents and loved ones of the victims of the shooting at Robb Elementary School pressed Uvalde City Council members Thursday for details on the official investigation into the tragedy — but their requests for more information were, once again, denied.

Their pleas come as police and Uvalde government officials have routinely denied access to details of the shooting requested by media, elected officials and family members of the 19 children and two teachers killed May 24 inside the small school about 100 miles west of San Antonio. At Thursday’s scheduled council meeting in Uvalde, Mayor Don McLaughlin said the Texas Department of Public Safety and Uvalde County District Attorney’s Office said releasing such information would jeopardize the investigation.

“We’re looking for some answers that nobody seems to be getting and it’s just making Uvalde PD and everybody else look even more guilty,” said Berlinda Arreola, who is the grandmother of a young girl killed in the shooting according to ABC News .

“Nobody’s giving us any answers,” said another family member of a teacher killed, who did not publicly identify herself when speaking to council members, according to The Texas Tribune . “It’s been over a month. You have no idea how frustrating that is. We’re sitting here, just listening to empty words.”

Council members received an update on the investigation behind closed doors Thursday night, but McLaughlin declined to release any findings publicly.

“We’re not trying to hide anything from you,” McLaughlin said during the meeting. “We don’t have anything.”

Parents and loved ones were also upset that Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde CISD police chief who ordered cops to wait nearly an hour before confronting the shooter, has yet to show up to a council meeting. Arredondo was elected as a council member earlier this year and sworn in on June 1. He has missed two regular meetings and a special emergency meeting. If he misses the next regular meeting, he could be eligible for a recall election .

Texas schools will be required to secure all exterior doors, train staff on safety by September, TEA says

by www.chron.com Leave a Comment

Texas public schools will be required to secure exterior doors, train staff on safety procedures and review threat response plans before the next school year begins under new school safety requirements issued by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) following the deadliest school shooting in state history.

The TEA released the new safety guidance Thursday, which requires school districts to conduct weekly exterior door sweeps, complete a summer safety audit and review emergency operations and active threat plans by Sept. 1. All campus staff, including substitutes, must also be trained on campus safety procedures.

Earlier this month, Gov. Greg Abbott directed the agency to require weekly campus door inspections in response to the Robb Elementary School shooting. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed after a gunman entered the school through an unlocked exterior door . Last week, the TEA also announced plans to check whether hundreds of thousands of external school building doors lock properly before the the start of the next school year.

Among considerations included in the TEA’s latest audit are how schools could provide first responders with quick access to keys as well as observing opportunities to “foster positive relationships” between school community members and campus law enforcement. Law enforcement in Uvalde has faced ongoing criticism for its response to the shooting, including allegedly waiting to breach the classroom where the massacre occurred for keys that may not have even been needed .

The TEA, Texas School Safety Center, and other state agencies are also working to expand “technical assistance for emergency operations plan development, conducting threat assessment protocols, expanding availability of school-based law enforcement, improving the efficacy of drills and incident preparedness exercises, and supporting [local educational agency] efforts in implementing multi-tiered system of supports,” according to Thursday’s announcement.

“We understand that the safety of students and staff is always the top priority of Texas public school systems,” TEA Commissioner Mike Morath and Texas School Safety Center Director Kathy Martinez-Prather wrote in a joint letter Thursday. “While the requirements described herein may be new to a few, we know that most schools in Texas are already implementing these actions and more to keep our students and staff safe.”

The TEA will be collecting data from the audit to evaluate changes that need to be made to facilities, which will be sent to state lawmakers in order to construct funding requests. There are more than 1,200 school districts in Texas and more than 3,000 campuses.

This week, Abbott and other state leaders announced the transfer of $105.5 million to support statewide school safety and mental health initiatives, which will help fund items like bulletproof shields, silent panic alert technology, safety audits and mental health services.

Milwaukee School Counselor Put On Leave After Refusing To Support Transgender Students

by dailycaller.com Leave a Comment

A Milwaukee Public School counselor was placed on administrative leave after stating she would refuse to support any transgender students, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

The school district announced Friday that Marissa Darlingh was put on leave on June 15, the last day of school, for speaking out against transgender students, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. Darlingh’s speech at a rally on April 23 was posted to Youtube by the Women’s Liberation Radio News, which launched an internal investigation into her conduct by the Milwaukee Public School district. (RELATED: Puberty Blockers, Trans Hormones Connected To Rising Teen Suicide, Report Finds)

“My name is Marissa Darlingh. I am an elementary school counselor in Milwaukee Public Schools, and I oppose gender ideology ever entering the walls of my school building,” Darlingh said. “On my dead f-ing body will my students be exposed to the harms of gender identity ideology.”

WATCH:

On Saturday, protesters with the Black Educators Caucus wrote messages in chalk outside Darlingh’s home reading “protect trans kids” and “protect kids from Marissa,” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

“Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty is representing Marissa in the investigation and we are attempting to work with the District to resolve the issue so that Marissa can continue doing the job that she loves,” Deputy Counsel Luke Berg told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The MPS is currently investigating if Darlingh’s remarks qualify as “immoral conduct,” which could lead to her educator license to be revoked, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Milwaukee Public Schools did not immediately respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.

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School System Downplayed Alleged Sexual Misconduct Against 12-Year Old, Citing ‘Hard Life Of Suspect, Suit Claims | The Daily Wire

by www.dailywire.com Leave a Comment

A Virginia school district turned a blind eye to horrific sexual abuse in a middle school in 2012, with staff members showing more compassion for an alleged attacker than for the victim, a new court filing alleges.

The allegations have come to light a decade later because the victim waited until she was an adult to sue and the case has been in the courts for the last three years. The explosive claims against Fairfax County Public Schools were revealed in a newly filed amended complaint and paint a disturbing picture of gang activity and sex trafficking in the area.

The events occurred when the girl, identified in court papers as B.R., was a 12-year-old student at Rachel Carson Middle School. One of her alleged attackers was an eighth grader called only C.K. in court papers, while other alleged attackers were unknown men who allegedly gang raped her in a closet in the school after C.K. bragged that he was grooming her for “friends” who would “make a lot of money” off of her, the complaint says.

The complaint says that C.K. waited for B.R. at the bus stop after school, brandished a knife, and “led Plaintiff to a secluded nearby area outside where he wrestled Plaintiff to the ground, held her there against her will, removed her clothing, and forced Plaintiff… to perform oral sex.” Similar events occurred on a near-daily basis for several days, until the girl’s mother heard a voicemail message in which her daughter’s tormentor crudely threatened to sodomize her, according to the complaint.

Although it was before the alleged gang rape and the girl had not yet told her parents the extent of the abuse she had allegedly endured, her parents went to school officials in February of 2011 to complain of persistent sexual harassment in the school halls, the voicemail from C.K., and so claim that C.K. had stolen $50 from B.R. Officials allegedly brushed her complaint aside.

“Assistant Principal S.T. told Plaintiff and her parents that C.K. ‘had a very hard life and been in enough trouble,’ and asked Plaintiff and her mother why they were trying to ‘ruin a young boy’s life,’” the complaint states.

Assistant Principal S.T. then visited C.K.’s home, where his mother told him that he was “borrowing” the $50. After that conversation, the assistant principal told B.R.’s parents that it appeared to be a “boy girl thing” in which B.R. was “sexually active” with C.K. The assistant principal returned the $50 while laughing that B.R. should take it back before she spent it on Christmas shopping herself, the complaint says.

The abuse got worse after she went to school officials, culminating in a student dragging her into a closet in the school building after school where she was “raped by three unknown males (Mike Roes 1 – 3) consistent with the modus operandi of human and sexual traffickers in the Fairfax community,” the lawsuit alleged.

In February 2012, B.K.’s parents began keeping her home from school, and she disclosed the full extent of the alleged sexual abuse. On March 5, her parents went to the police and spoke with Detective Fred Chambers – the former School Resource Officer for the middle school — who directed her to take a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (“SANE”) evaluation which “revealed she suffered contusions inside her anus thereby corroborating her report of rape and sodomy,” the suit says.

Yet the detective went on to accuse the girl of making a false rape accusation “despite his knowledge of corroborating evidence,” the complaint says. School officials began investigating the alleged victim, the complaint claims.

“Under the guise of a school investigation, and in the course and scope of his authority as principal of RCMS, Principal A.F. visited Plaintiff’s elementary school to dig up ‘dirt’ on Plaintiff,” it says.

Although little is known of the assailants alleged to have gang-raped the girl, the events happened at the same time that NPR was reporting that the gang MS-13 was forcing children into prostitution in Fairfax. In 2014, FCPS warned of sex trafficking in a page on its website that included a video saying one gang alone had attempted to recruit more than 800 girls in the county.

FCPS had a pattern of downplaying sexual misconduct so that the school system’s statistics looked better, the complaint says. “In effect, FCSB had a policy, custom, and practice of sweeping student-on-student sexual violence and sexual harassment under the rug,” it says.

Schools also required to disclose certain incidents in a statewide database. Loudoun County acknowledged failing to report to the database properly after The Daily Wire pointed out that both the infamous bathroom rape and an earlier well-known locker room incident were missing.

In the 2011-2012 school year, when the Rachel Carson complaints were filed, FCPS reported zero sexual assaults and five sexual batteries across its 180,000 students. In the 2018-19 school year, the most recent before coronavirus disruptions, FCPS reported 10 incidents of “sexual battery against student.”

FCPS did not return a request for comment.

Why are schools locking up so many of our kids?

by www.newsweek.com Leave a Comment

This article first appeared on Intellectual Takeout.

If parents were to lock their children in a confined space for a lengthy period of time, it is highly likely that those parents would be arrested for child abuse and their parental rights threatened. (In fact, this just happened in Arizona recently.)

If public schools do this, however, the outcome is quite different.

The use of physical restraints, locked “seclusion rooms,” and solitary confinement for children is rampant throughout the nation’s public schools.

In a comprehensive 2014 analysis by NPR and ProPublica, analysts found that “restraint and seclusion were used at least 267,000 times nationwide” in the 2011-2012 school year. Schools put children in seclusion rooms approximately 104,000 times in that one year.

ProPublica reports that the restraint and seclusion practices included “pinning uncooperative children facedown on the floor, locking them in dark closets and tying them up with straps, handcuffs, bungee cords or even duct tape.”

Many school officials contend that using restraints and locked seclusion for children are sometimes necessary when children are out of control in the school building and need to calm down. But a 2014 U.S. Senate report on these practices argues that these extreme tactics are unnecessary and damaging to children.

The report asserts:

There is no evidence that physically restraining or putting children in unsupervised seclusion in the K-12 school system provides any educational or therapeutic benefit to a child. In fact, use of either seclusion or restraints in non-emergency situations poses significant physical and psychological danger to students.

Particularly troubling is that the NPR/Pro Publica analysis of school seclusion and restraint practices found that the vast majority of the cases (75 percent) involved children with disabilities.

In a separate analysis earlier this year, the Education Week Research Center found that 70,000 special education students were restrained or secluded in the 2013-2014 school year.

The Serious Consequences of Restraining Children

Beyond the obvious emotional trauma to a child of being physically restrained or locked in a secluded room, these restraint and seclusion practices sometimes result in serious injury.

A 2012 ABC News investigation found that “thousands of autistic and disabled schoolchildren have been injured and dozens have died” from the use of seclusion and restraint protocols in the nation’s public schools.

Writing earlier this week in The Huffington Post , educator Laurie Levy shared a story of a small, first-grade special education girl in her school district who was placed in locked seclusion, “crying hysterically for 45 minutes in what was euphemistically called the ‘Calm Down Room.'”

Levy goes on to write:

The closet had a panel window that permitted an adult to look in, but the window was blocked by taped-up paper from the floor to four feet from the ground and also at the top, so the child could not look out. This also made the closet rather dark.

The child was repeatedly slapping the window with her hands but was not tall enough to see anything.

Actions that are considered criminal when parents do them are somehow tolerated in the nation’s public schools. Locking children in dark closets or physically restraining them with ropes and ties can cause serious emotional trauma and bodily harm. Parents shouldn’t do it, and neither should the state.

Kerry McDonald has a B.A. in Economics from Bowdoin and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard.