Federal Court Sides with Obama, Forces VA School to Let Transgender Student Choose Bathroom

Listen to Military Veteran Talk Radio iHeart.SmythRadio.com
Facebook.com/SmythRadio

The Associated Press

by WARNER TODD HUSTON20 Apr 2016Gloucester, VA481

This week a federal court sided with a transgender student who insisted that the Obama administration’s reading of federal Title IX rules would allow her to choose her own bathroom at her Virginia high school.

Gavin Grimm, 16, a student at Gloucester High School in Gloucester, Virginia, demanded the district allow her to use the boys restroom because she identifies as a male. School officials, though, denied the request in December.

After a period of public discussion, Gloucester school district officials decided in a 6-to-1 vote that school bathrooms should be used only by those students whose sex corresponds to the gender the facility is designated to serve.

But the student took the case to a federal court, citing federal Title IX sex discrimination rules. Grimm maintained that the federal government can force schools to allow transgender students to choose whatever bathroom they feel like using.

After hearing the case, in a 2-to-1 ruling the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the student, saying a lower court should have agreed with the student’s interpretation of the federal discrimination rules.

In a public statement the student said she felt “vindicated” by the newest ruling.

“Today’s decision gives me hope that my fight will help other kids avoid discriminatory treatment at school,” the student said.

In the same statement, the Virginia ACLU said the decision “reinforces” the Obama Department of Education’s interpretation of the policy.

“With this decision,” the VA ACLU said, “we hope that schools and legislators will finally get the message that excluding transgender kids from the restrooms is unlawful sex discrimination.”

The National Center for Transgender Equality also celebrated the ruling, saying the decision is “a very important decision that promotes fairness and dignity for all students.”

The Appeals Court ruling means that the original lower court will have to revisit its ruling to correspond to the upper court’s decision.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter@warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com

Read More Stories About:

Big Government, Education, Social Justice,Education, ACLU, title ix, transgender bathroom bill, My Transgender Kids

U.S. Education Department Warns Schools Against Discrimination Toward Muslim and Refugee Students

LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images

by DR. SUSAN BERRY4 Jan 20161,140

A “Dear Colleague” guidance letter, signed by former U.S. Education Department (USED) Secretary Arne Duncan and Acting Secretary John King, warns school leaders against “targeting of particular students for harassment or blame,” particularly Muslim and Syrian refugee students.

According to the Washington Post, theguidance letter comes following a 2014survey conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—of Muslim youth aged 11-18 in California—that found 55 percent of Muslim youth reported being “bullied” at school because of their Islamic religion during this past year.

“This is twice as high as the national statistic of students reporting being bullied at school,” CAIR reports. “Many students experienced multiple types of bullying; however, the most common type of bullying American Muslim students faced was verbal at 52%.”

As Breitbart News has reported, while CAIR portrays itself as a civil rights group, the organization has often embraced radical Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

The USED guidance letter—dated December 31, 2015, but embargoed until Monday, January 4, 2016—said: “[W]e are writing to enlist your help, as educational leaders, to ensure that your schools and institutions of higher education are learning environments in which students are free from discrimination and harassment based on their race, religion, or national origin.”

The letter continued:

We support your efforts to ensure that young people are not subjected to discrimination or harassment based on race, religion, or national origin, particularly at this time when fear and anger are heightened, and when public debate sometimes results in the dissemination of misinformation. Such inappropriate conduct in schools can take many forms, from abusive name-calling to defamatory graffiti to physical violence directed at a student because of a student’s actual or perceived race or ancestry, the country the student’s family comes from, or the student’s religion or cultural traditions. If ignored, this kind of conduct can jeopardize students’ ability to learn, undermine their physical and emotional well-being, provoke retaliatory acts, and exacerbate community conflicts.

We cannot permit discrimination or harassment in schools against students based on their actual or perceived race, religion, or national origin, because parents and students look to you for leadership, their hearing from you that such conduct is unconditionally wrong and will not be tolerated in our schools will make a real difference. In response to recent and ongoing issues, we also urge you to anticipate the potential challenges that may be faced by students who are especially at risk of harassment — including those who are, or are perceived to be, Syrian, Muslim, Middle Eastern, or Arab, as well as those who are Sikh, Jewish, or students of color. For example, classroom discussions and other school activities should be structured to help students grapple with current events and conflicting viewpoints in constructive ways, and not in ways that result in the targeting of particular students for harassment or blame.

In mid-December, State Department official Anne Richard testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, “Four percent of all the Syrians we have brought have been Christian or other minorities.”

As CNSNews.com reports, only 53 of the 2,184 Syrian refugees admitted to the United States since civil war broke in Syria in 2011 are Christians, while 2,098 are Muslims.

Calling upon school leaders to ensure schools are “safe, respectful, and nondiscriminatory learning environments,” Duncan and King refer to ideas generated during a meeting with college campus leaders from schools throughout the country in November, which developedsolutions to racism on campus such as:

Institute a statement of values.Teach cultural competency.Make “teachable moments.”Lead from the top.Diversify leadership and faculty.Deal swiftly with complaints.Support student-led efforts.

Duncan and King let school leaders know that administrators may find their institutions’ “strongly held values” are challenged by others who create “dissonance.”

The two federal leaders urge “students, staff, and parents to report all incidents of harassment and bullying so that the school can address them before the situation escalates.”

In its survey titled, “Mislabeled: The Impact of School Bullying and Discrimination on California Muslim Students,” CAIR asserts, “Islamophobia, the fear or hatred of Islam and Muslims, in larger society filters into the school environment and manifests as teacher discrimination and student bullying.”

“The consequences of encountering Islamophobia at school are numerous,” CAIR states. “Muslim students may feel marginalized, disempowered, and begin to internalize negative stereotypes. Minority students who feel disconnected or alienated from the school environment will lack confidence, suffer academically, and fail to fully invest in their future.”

CAIR warns that “safe and inclusive school environments” must include textbooks that are “current and free of Islamophobic bias” and teachers who know “how to teach in diverse and multicultural classrooms and create inclusive environments by becoming familiar with the various religious identities of their students in addition to their racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identities.”

Read More Stories About:

Big Government, Education, Syrian refugees, Muslim Brotherhood, racism',Arne Duncan, CAIR, Islamophobia, Council on American-Islamic Relations,Multiculturalism, bullying, U.S. Education Department, John King, campus diversity,CAIR linked to Muslim Brotherhood, Muslim students

ClockBoy Part II Muslim Inventions Explode

‘Zero Tolerance’ Brings Arrest of Another Teen for ‘Bomb Threat’ Device at Texas School

Screenshot: DMN YouTube

by MERRILL HOPE21 Dec 20152,229

A Texas middle school-aged boy was arrested on Friday, Dec. 11 for allegedly threatening to blow up his suburban Dallas public school in Arlington. The incident is now bubbling up with conflicting stories, a comparison to “Clock Boy” Ahmed Mohamed, and no mention of school zero tolerance policies behind these situations.

Armaan Singh, a student at Nichols Junior High in the Arlington Independent School District, was arrested last Friday on the charge of making a terroristic threat following a classmate’s report that Singh threatened to detonate a bomb at Nichols Junior High School. Singh’s “charging backpack,” had wires to charge electronics. Arlington PD said Singh admitted twice to telling another student he was going to blow up his school, using his backpack but Singh told officials he was only joking when he told a classmate he had a bomb in his backpack. Authorities kept Singh at juvenile detention through the weekend, released to house arrest,according to KDFW 4, who spoke to the 12-year-old.

“On Thursday, I was doing my test in my class and then the student behind me saw inside my backpack,” said Singh. “He saw this battery thing I have for charging electronics and he assumed that it was a bomb, and I said, ‘No, it’s not.’”

Arlington police spokesman Lt. Christopher Cook said it doesn’t matter that Singh told them he was joking, KDFW 4 reported. “People have got to learn they cannot make these types of threats, which cause alarm, which cause evacuations,” noted Cook. “Just because you say it’s a joke, it doesn’t get you out of trouble.”

At the time of the incident, police evacuated the classroom and quickly determined that there was no credible threat without calling in the bomb squad.

“Unfortunately, nowadays you cannot do that,” said Cook. “When speech crosses that line, whether it’s written, like on social media, or it’s verbalized, like it was in this manner, we take that very seriously.”

Singh and his family insisted that the other student made the whole thing up, and that authorities overreacted because of his Indian ethnicity, keeping him in custody for three nights. The Washington Post chimed in by asking if Singh was “Another ‘Clock Kid,'” referencing “Clock Boy” Ahmed Mohamed and drawing “parallels” between the two arrests: “The two cities near Dallas neighbor one another,and the circumstances of their arrests are similar.” They highlighted that Mohamed was Muslim and Singh, Sikh. Singh, of Indian descent, was born in San Antonio, according to the Dallas Morning News, which reported police said the Singh family’s faith and ethnicity were irrelevant to the case.

Breitbart Texas reports on the school-to-prison pipeline and the often devastating outcomes of these choking zero tolerance policies that criminalize typical kid behavior nationwide, which played a pivotal role in the Ahmed Mohamed incident in Irving ISD. The Associated Pressagreed.

In November, local law enforcement arrested Arlington ISD high school student Shalaria Jones for multiple alleged social media threats in which she was connected to tweets calling out a campus shooting. Breitbart Texas reported Arlington PD Police Chief Will Johnson emphasized they took that threat serious. The Arlington ISD Student Code of Conduct handbook defines a terroristic threat as a “threat of violence to any person or property with the intent to cause a reaction by an official or volunteer to deal with emergencies, prevent or interrupt the occupation or use of a building, place others in fear of serious bodily injury, or impair or influence activities of the government or school.

Texas public school Student Code of Conduct handbooks are often posted online in school districts. They include a whole slew of potential violations written in accordance with the state’s 1995 Safe Schools Act and Chapter 37 of the Texas Education Code, including threats, hoaxes, plus perceived and sometimes even discretionary threats and their often harsh blanket consequences. In Texas, the education code grants school districts broad discretionary leeway and the authority to refer students for those discretionary offenses deemed “disruptive.”

Arlington ISD spokeswoman Leslie Johnston told Breitbart Texas: “When children claim to have bombs or threaten to do harm to students and tell other students this, we don’t consider it unreasonable to call the police. In fact, we work with the Arlington Police Department to investigate all threats and determine if they are legitimate.”

She emphasized, “We did attempt to contact the parents (last) Friday afternoon. We also had a meeting scheduled with the parents Tuesday, but they did not arrive for the meeting. There was a meeting with the parents held this morning.”

Johnston pointed out that that the district will do “whatever is necessary to maintain the safety and security of its students, and we are confident that our actions are appropriate in all respects.” Because of the student privacy law, Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), she cannot divulge information pertaining to specific disciplinary matters unless the parents sign a release to share such information and records, something that Ahmed Mohamed’s parents never signed for their respective school district in Irving.

Breitbart Texas reached out to Arlington police but did not hear back before press time.

 Follow Merrill Hope on Twitter@OutOfTheBoxMom.

Read More Stories About:

Big Government, Breitbart Texas, Education,"Clock Boy" Ahmed Mohamed, Arlington ISD