The BBC has pulled material from its Bitesize educational website, used by 1.7 million pupils a week, after it was caught rewarding kids for backing open borders and pushing Left-wing views on migration and Net Zero.
Children as young as five are being suspended for sexual misconduct, with schools in England recording 7,278 suspensions last year – nearly 40 every school day and a 12% jump on the previous year.
School resource officers (SROs) in Texas referred tens of thousands of elementary and middle schoolers for prosecution for relatively minor misconduct over the last decade, a news investigation found.
An analysis by The New York Times and the San Antonio Express-News reported that, as the number of SROs in Texas grew, children in Texas ages 10 to 13 were referred to prosecution for misbehaving in school more than 47,000 times since 2014. A referral doesn't necessarily result in charges being filed, but each one represents a minor being taken into police custody and put in contact with the criminal justice system, which can have long-lasting educational, emotional, and financial impacts for students and their families.
"Most of the students were accused of minor offenses, like making threats, using cannabis vapes or lashing out at classmates or teachers," the papers reported. "Few caused serious physical harm."
Among the examples cited by the Times and Express-News were an 11-year-old who bumped into a school counselor, a 10-year-old who said he saw someone on campus with a weapon, and a 10-year-old who kicked an assistant principal after his cellphone was taken away.
In one case, a 12-year-old girl who refused to go to the principal's office was handcuffed, arrested, and driven to the school police headquarters. "When she would not put her hand on a fingerprint machine, officers twisted her opposite arm behind her back until she screamed and complied, according to body camera footage," the outlets reported.
The analysis found that referrals of children 10 to 13 increased by a greater percentage than referrals of older students. (Children under 10 cannot be prosecuted under Texas law; many other states don't set a minimum age for delinquency.)
The two outlets published another joint investigation in May on how SROs in Texas schools have used heavy-handed tactics, including Tasers and pepper spray, against students over seemingly minor misconduct.
The findings mirror other recent studies. A report published in July by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Iowa found that, while SROs were placed in Iowa schools to keep students safe from violence, the threat they most commonly dealt with was illicit vaping.
The number of police in schools nationally dramatically increased in recent years, growing by 23 percent at high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools between 2018 and 2021, largely under the justification of stopping mass shootings and handling violent situations.
Organizations like the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) say that carefully selected, well-trained officers act as a filter and decrease arrests by building strong relationships within the school with staff and students.
Civil liberties groups and disability advocates have long argued that increases in school police and zero-tolerance policies for petty disturbances have fueled the "school-to-prison" pipeline and led to disproportionate enforcement against minorities and students with disabilities. Those groups have been aided by viral news stories of policearresting and assaulting school children.
Following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 and national calls for police reform, several major school districts across the country ended their SRO programs.
However, several states that experienced horrific school shootings, like Florida and Texas, moved in the opposite direction, passing laws that required police officers or armed guardians in public schools.
A 2020 Reason investigation described how Florida schools had become a high-stakes experiment in policing after Florida more than doubled the number of SROs across the state following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. A study published in 2020found that after the increase, the number of Florida school arrests—which had been declining for years—suddenly started to rise. There was also a sharp increase in the use of physical restraint against students.
A 2021 working paper by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which billed itself as the broadest and most rigorous examination at the school level of how SROs impact student outcomes, found that while SROs "do effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools," they did not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents.
Another study by researchers at the University of Maryland and the firm Westat, who studied several dozen middle and high schools in California, found that increasing the number of SROs led to both immediate and persistent increases in the number of drug and weapon offenses and the number of suspensions and expulsions of students.
Housing Rights and Public Policies Association (AHDPP) has explained exactly how the housing crisis is threatening Portugal’s very future. In an interview with Executive Digest, the association warns of the
by Michael Nevradakis Ph.D., Activist Post: State health departments can now purchase this season’s COVID-19 vaccines for low-income children through the CDC’s Vaccines for Children Program. Vaccine advocates had complained about a delay — but families and pediatricians concerned about vaccine safety criticized the decision. “The days of just injecting everyone without considering the individual […]
The BBC has been accused of using its Bitesize website to push open borders, Net Zero and woke ideology on children as young as 11, teaching them that more immigration is great and anyone who disagrees is likely a bigot.
At least 350 children remain in custody at this time, where they face harsh conditions, including torture, food deprivation, isolation, and denial of medical care.
Israel is restricting prosthetics and rehabilitation equipment from entering Gaza, leaving thousands of children waiting for a medical evacuation that may never come.
“No Palestinians in the West Bank are exempt from this threat, including Christian communities and institutions,” said Bishop Dr Imad Haddad of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land
Along with other medical supplies, dental materials have not been allowed into Gaza for the past three years, forcing patients to choose between unaffordable treatment, extraction, or painkillers.
More seven year-olds are on disability benefits than 50 year-olds amid a surge in payouts for childhood ADHD and other mental health conditions, official figures show.
Jerry Seinfeld mocked protesters highlighting Palestinian children’s deaths, dancing onstage and saying he would send a demonstrator’s ticket money to Israel.
For Boston Magazine, Kara Baskin explores a growing subculture of tweens and teens who don’t feel entirely human. Some identify as one animal, like a cat or a dog; others identify with multiple animals. One kid Baskin speaks to, Sol, says she “doesn’t summon the animals, but rather they come and go on their own schedule.” These young people call themselves therians (distinct from furries, who are fans of anthropomorphic animal characters). Baskin provides a fascinating glimpse into a world where adolescents can express themselves and explore their identities.
Bafflement is the baseline condition of raising kids right now. The adolescent quest for self-discovery is timeless—but today’s parents experimented in ways that were analog: new hairstyles, inscrutable music, beer snuck in the woods. Their own parents might not have liked it, but they could at least relate.
Now the landscape of adolescent discovery is literally foreign, thanks to social media, which has turbocharged once-obscure subcultures like the furry fandom—and, at its rarer edge, therianthropy—and redefined what “fringe” even means. Even if a kid is the only therian at school, she can find 400 more people just like her online. That’s one of the biggest challenges for parents in the algorithm age: The world your kid actually lives in is one you can’t enter. It touches the fear in every parent, therian kid or not: What happens when our kids inhabit a world we don’t understand, with idols we don’t recognize?
No doubt Ed Davey lovingly cares for his disabled son, says Joanna Gray. But he's not his "carer"; he's his father. It's a distinction Britain is fast losing sight of, to the detriment of us all.
The National Trust has sparked outrage over its "ultra-woke" plans to teach five- to 12-year-olds about the Black Power salute during a Black History Month baking workshop.
A councillor has been punished for raising safeguarding concerns about an LGBTQ stall displaying a large purple dildo next to a children’s colouring area at a family library. With the help of the FSU, he's fighting back.
The Gaza Children Village plans to record classroom conversations and use AI to flag what it calls 'hateful' speech, prompting concerns over surveillance, free expression and Palestinians' right to shape their children's education.
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