Skipped gym class costs student diploma
Isabel Gottlieb is a dedicated student. She has varsity letters in three sports, plays trumpet in the school band and loaded down her senior year with advanced placement and honors courses. An administrative error made when she transferred to Bow High School (Bow School District) forced her to decide between an AP course and gym class. She chose education over the redundant gym class so the school will not permit her to graduate.
The missing credit wasn’t caught by the school last spring when Gottlieb’s schedule was set. The class in question is called BEST, or Building Essential Skills for Tomorrow, and is required for all Bow students to graduate.
At the Seattle high school Gottlieb attended before moving to Bow before her junior year, gym requirements often were waived for students in varsity sports. But those waivers aren’t something Bow High School is willing to accept.
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Both Gottlieb and her mother said the school suggested dropping either band, chorus, AP biology or calculus. But she and her mother decided sacrificing any of those would have diminished the quality of Gottlieb’s education.
“I’m trying to get into college and someone isn’t going to want to see someone drop an AP biology class a month into the year in order to pick up P.E.,” Gottlieb said.
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Boy in a Santa suit asked to quit dance
Bryan Lanford was in the holiday spirit. He dressed up as Santa to attend the Hampton Academy Junior High School holiday party. Unfortunately the Grinch (cleverly disguised as Interim Principal Fred Muscara) saw him coming.
“I went to the dance with my friend,” said Bryan Lafond, who is in seventh grade. “He had an elf hat on and we thought it was pretty cool. Everyone loved the suit, but when I went by the principal, he asked why I was dressed like that.”
Principal Fred Muscara said he told the boy he couldn�t get into the dance because he was wearing the costume.
“It was a holiday party,” said Muscara. “It was not a Christmas party. There is a separation of church and state. We have a lot of students that go to Hampton Academy Junior High that have different religions. We have to be sensitive to that.”
So the reason for a holiday celebration is to not allow the celebration of any holiday? Muscara also gets a complete miss on the separation of church and state. The school forcing kids to dress up like Santa might be against the rules but allowing a kid to play the right jolly old elf has nothing to do with that.
I assume that Hampton Academy also prohibits any jewelry depicting a cross or star of David, yarmulkes, head scarves and other religious paraphernalia. After all, there are people of different religions at the school and they must be sensitive to that.
More contact information and additional commentary may be found at Precinct 333.
(Tip credit to The Precinct Chair, Mike Eaton, David Kane and Phil Kennard)
NRA backs student on gun photo in yearbook
Senior sticks to his gun defending school photo
The Londonderry High School yearbook is full of pictures of students holding items from their hobbies. Trombones, paintbrushes, you name it. What it does not have is a picture of Blake Douglass with his skeet shooting rifle. The reason? Having a picture of a gun violates their zero tolerance policy.
School officials have said a photo with a gun violates their zero-tolerance policies.
“This is a case of political correctness run amok,” said NRA spokeswoman Kelly Hobbs.
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Parents Sue Teacher Who Called Kids Gay
7th grade teacher William Sheehan referred to two boys in his class as homosexual lovers. Twice. He spoke with the girlfriend of one the boys, telling her why he thought the boy was gay. When the boys’ parents found out the principal tried to get the girl to lie about what the teacher had told her. There is now a lawsuit over the teacher’s and principal’s actions.
The parents, Stephen and Dawn Call and Nathan and Julie Cheney, said O’Neil and the school superintendent didn’t do anything to the teacher after receiving complaints.
The teacher’s lawyer says the school offered to have the teacher apologize in class, but the parents wanted a larger, multi-class assembly for the apology.
Lawyer Steven Sacks called the incident a lapse in judgment. He said Sheehan made one remark “in jest.”
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Guns not illegal in schools
“The federal Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 defines a firearm as any weapon designed to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.” That’s a pretty reasonable definition. Schools take that a lot farther, broadening the definition to include BB guns, replicas, toys, even water pistols.
“You don�t look very good when you suspend a third-grader, but you�ve got to consider the safety of 500 students,” said Dave O�Connor, principal of Marston School in Hampton.
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The Hampstead School District, which suspended two eighth-graders for having a plastic pellet gun and pelting other students on a school bus, has a policy that broadens the federal definition of a weapon to include “any device, object or artifact that has been determined by the Superintendent of Schools to be dangerous … and also determined to have no other legitimate purpose in school.”
The Exeter Region Cooperative School District also has a broad policy prohibiting devices designed to expe* any type of projectile,” whether a lead bullet or rubber suction dart.
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