This is screwed up.....

[patgund]

I smell lawsuit here. I smell major lawsuit here. I suspect the principal is going to have his ass handed to him, and the "military liaison" may find himself reassigned. There are so many places where this asshat has screwed up it's not even funny.

Hard lessons from poetry class: Speech is free unless it's critical

This part in particular caught my attention:

"In March 2003, a teenage girl named Courtney presented one of her poems before an audience at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Albuquerque, then read the poem live on the school's closed-circuit television channel.

A school military liaison and the high school principal accused the girl of being "un-American" because she criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's failure to give substance to its "No child left behind" education policy.

The girl's mother, also a teacher, was ordered by the principal to destroy the child's poetry. The mother refused and may lose her job."

Yes, you read right. The girl's mother was ordered, on pain of losing her job, to destroy her daughter's poetry.

Add to that some of the other stuff the principal is doing, including hindering the poetry teacher from starting at a new school, and you see why I suspect he's going to have his ass legally handed to him.

Comments

[silkensteel.livejournal.com]

That's over a year ago. Has this gotten any further publicity?

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Follow-up on that. Apparently a bit exaggerated, at least according to the girl who wrote the poem.
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_21.shtml#1085354422

[patgund.livejournal.com]

(Nods) While the response from the school is classic CYA, there were a couple of elements of this story that, once I looked at it, looked odd. Like the fact that, while the newspaper printed the story on May 15th of this year, the incident happened March of 2003.

Parts of it look legit, others don't pass the sniff test

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Yep. The sad thing is there's so much insanity in the school system that you can't really tell if a story is nonsense without that kind of followup.