By now, you probably have read that last week the Winooski school district’s thought-police enforced their their own democracy-repression agenda on taxpayer’s schoolchildren. Pretty shitty behavior for bureaucrats under any circumstances. This turns out to be worse. The Board Members kicked the children’s President out of the classroom until those same Board Members could determine whether the President supported the Board Members’ subjective, individual political agendas. That crosses the line to subversive.
From Board correspondence, it looks like the flat-earthers running the Winooski School Board are a more unhinged, more inherently anti-democracy then first reported.
Out of step. The Winooski School Board, as far as we know, is the ONLY school board in the State of Vermont to order its school superintendent to enforce total censorship of a speech by a sitting U.S. President.
Paranoid. According to public documents circulated by School Board members and released to GMD, the Winooski School Board is just plain paranoid as well as unpatriotic. Through its Chief Politburo henchman, James Ticehurst, the School Board last week told schools that the President’s address to American students may not be seen by “the students until it should first be reviewed by the board for content.” (Arrogant? Chilling? Paranoid? Pick one.) By the high command of the school board, no teacher may “air the President’s speech to the students on Tuesday.”
Ticehurst also wrote that no student may see his or her President’s speech, directed to America’s students, unless he and other Board Members reviewed the content of President Obama’s speech and “approved it for distribution to the student population.” (Arrogant? Chilling? Paranoid? Pick one, or MORE!)
James Ticehurst thinks that Barack Obama needs to go through him first, for his “approval,” before Winooski students can have their President available for discussion, leadership, inspiration or uncensored. What a paranoid asshole.
and they do not paint a favorable picture of the system when compared to the rest of the state. I’m no expert, but I am a parent, and this example of paranoid politics sickens me. If the President’s speech would have made a difference to even one of those high-risk Winooski students, it would have been worth standing up to the self-appointed censors in the community. Having been successful in suppressing a pep-talk by the President, I suppose this same group will now move on to a broader agenda of curriculum control, perhaps including a retrofit of the life-sciences?
Need to follow the example of these people at the next school committee meeting.
Nothing like having a packed room tell the school board how they feel about such arrogance….
No matter how much we love our bubble (good lord, I sure do) there are, none the less, Americans living here in Vermont.
Agree with Petey. I was at the Tea party demo on Saturday as well, though a bit further down, and did not see Petey’s sign, but there was no counter protesters, no one from our side was even there (that I know of) except me and Petey. The demos and progs are sleepwalking here, while the wingnuts are effectively organizing. Even in Washington, the liberals just seem like dead sheep and nothing gets done.
I was at the state house. I watched their assembly there. I stayed in back, up by the motor vehicles department, as with a definite minority of one, I figured that it was wiser not to challenge them:) But a few of them eyed me suspiciously. I heard all the patriotic songs, the screaming denunciations of Obama (nothing about Westboro, though), and the revolutionary calls to take back America. I saw the “no gov. health care signs,” and pondered how so many of the people marching underneath them were on medicare.
“Get the gov. hands off my medicare,” as the saying goes.
Later on, I was out by Capital Grounds. They came streaming back down East State. One of them, a woman shoved a sign into my face about “Socialism is not freedom.” I muttered to her that “Socialism is freedom,” and that she had better get that sign out of my view. Then she was gone.
In the weekly police reports there was the report of an unlawful (unpermitted probably) assembly at the state house on Sept. 12.