90 Miles From Tyranny : Teacher Coalition Seeks to End Obama School Discipline Policy: ‘A Lot of Fear in Schools’

infinite scrolling

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Teacher Coalition Seeks to End Obama School Discipline Policy: ‘A Lot of Fear in Schools’

The school discipline policy that may have allowed Nikolas Cruz to escape arrest by Broward County law enforcement and ultimately purchase the firearm he used to kill 17 people is in effect in over 50 school districts across the country.

“He probably wouldn’t have been able to buy the murder weapon if the school had referred him to law enforcement,” veteran FBI agent Michael Biasello told RealClearInvestigations (RCI).

In 2014, the Obama administration issued a “Dear Colleague” guidance that threatened school districts – whose disciplinary measures showed a disproportionately greater number of minority students affected – could be subject to investigation by the Departments of Justice and Education, regardless of whether the behaviors leading to the discipline were unacceptable.



Deborah York, now a retired teacher in Edina, Minnesota, tells Breitbart News she sees “a lot of fear in schools, not only physical fear of being assaulted or violently abused, but ‘system fear’ that’s coming from the top down about gag orders and data privacy, where you can’t talk among your fellow teachers, even to share information.”

“If you do, you get into these lengthy investigations where they try to destroy you and – in a way – they’re trying to get rid of you,” she states.

York formed a coalition that worked with the Minnesota state legislature in 2016 to pass a bill that grants teachers a reinforced right to remove aggressive students and to be informed when students with violence in their histories are placed in their classrooms.

Her group produced the video above titled, Silenced Classroom.

In December, York and her group met with U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, other Trump administration education officials, and the Human Rights Commission to address the rise in school violence – particularly since the Obama Dear Colleague letter – and to ask them to consider a campaign to make the recent Minnesota teacher protection law a national law.

Breitbart News reached out to the U.S. Education Department for comment about the meeting with York and her colleagues, but received no immediate response.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has been supportive of the Obama school discipline policy. In fact, AFT is asking its members to register for a webinar about how to “protect the Obama-era school discipline guidance” that allows disruptive and even aggressive students to avoid disciplinary procedures “to help schools prevent and address discipline practices that discriminate against students of color.”


AFT is joining with the NAACP and The Dignity in Schools Campaign – which includes members such as affiliates of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU, Black Lives Matter, Mom’s Rising, and Girls for Gender Equity – to fight to maintain the Obama-era school discipline policy during what they call a “Week of...
Read More HERE

1 comment:

edutcher said...

We always knew AFT never gave a damn about students. Now we know they feel the same about teachers.

Now we'll get to see how smart the teachers are. Something like this could end teacher unions.