A number of residents and students protested at the offices of the Ector County (Texas) Independent School District after officials said they would be making prayer in the graduation ceremony optional.
High school students in the district had voted to have prayer as part of the ceremony but the administrators completely ignored their wishes in scheduling an “opening” and “closing” delivered by students instead of an invocation and benediction. The students would not be chosen by the graduating seniors or by academic achievement but entirely by random selection.
The move came because the anti-Christian group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State threatened to sue the school if they allowed the students to follow through on their vote to have a prayer included in the event.
Students held up signs saying “We are a democracy; we voted to pray” and “As Americans, we have the freedom to pray.”
School board member Doyle Woodall said that the board did not want to take the action they did but that it was forced upon them by anti-Christianists using the courts to force their will on the majority.
“He responded in an extremely emotional manner.”
That was one of the excuses given by a spokesman for the Oakland Unified School District after a school resource officer was arrested on felony charges for dumping a wheelchair bound student onto the floor after punching him several times.
A wheelchair bound student, Francisco Martinez, was lingering with some other students in a hallway late for their classes. Two officers were seen in a security camera video telling the students they needed to move on to their classrooms. The students refused, so one of the officers, Marchell Mitchell, grabbed the handles of Martinez’ wheelchair and started to push him down the hallway.
Martinez objected and started slapping the officer’s hands in an attempt to get him to stop pushing the wheelchair.
The officer then handcuffed Martinez, struck him several times and then dumped the student onto the floor. The school immediately fired Mitchell and had him arrested by Oakland police.
“We as a district apologize to the family of the victim,” said Oakland Unified School District spokesman Troy Flint.
San Francisco University officials are trying to downplay a report that one of their professors used taxpayer dollars to fly to the middle east and meet with various terrorist groups.
A non-profit group discovered during a request through the California Public Records Act that Professor Rabab Abdulhadi received more than $7,000 to fly to Jordan and the West Bank. The professor had initially been scheduled to speak at a conference at American University in Lebanon but was removed from the speaking list. She still took the trip.
Professor Abdulhadi then met with Leila Khaled, a convicted terrorist hijacker and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terror group responsible for almost 160 bombings, assaults and assassinations. She also met with Sheikh Raed Salah, who funds the terrorist group Hamas and served a two-year terror related prison term.
The documents say the meetings with terrorists were set before the University provided the funding for the trip.
Professor Abdulhadi has spoken at various anti-Israeli events around the world.
Professor Abdulhadi did not return calls to Fox News.
Despite an administrator’s attempt to get prayer removed from the Pima Unified School District’s graduation, students made sure that God was given praise during the event.
Superintendent Sean Rickert had ordered the removal of prayer from the graduation event because he wanted to make sure he wasn’t violating the rights of any student who didn’t want to participate in or hear a prayer at the event. He said that he made the decision on his own without any threats of legal action against the school.
Community members and students were outraged at Rickert’s actions, and when the Superintendent and other school officials refused to change their mind on the matter, students took the matter into their own hands.
Not only did students present prayers as part of the ceremony, many graduates made a silent protest by handing a marble to the superintendent as they graduated, an indication they believed he had “lost his marbles” with his actions.
“My class wanted God in our graduation and we weren’t going to take no for an answer,” said Esperanza Gonzalez, one of the students who prayed at the event. “The world keeps saying ‘no to God, no to God’ unless you’re in prison, so we said yes to God because He has helped us throughout our entire high school career.”
A Florida school district that was openly discriminating against Christian athletes has reversed course and will now allow the Fellowship of Christian Athletes access to the schools.
Students at Mount Dora High School attempted to form a chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes when the officials at the school denied them the same rights given to other student groups. Those rights included access to school facilities and the right to hang promotional posters for events in the school hallways.
The students reached out to the Christian legal organization Liberty Counsel who filed a complaint with the school, saying that denying the students access because they approach things from a religious perspective is a clear violation of their First Amendment rights.
“Equal access means exactly what it says: equal access to every school facility used by other clubs,” Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel said. “This includes the use of classroom facilities, intercom systems, bulletin boards, yearbook, financial sponsorship and any other benefit afforded to secular clubs.”
Lake County School Board voted to support an agreement to end the lawsuit that gives the FCA the same access as other non-curricular student groups.
Jewish students at Chicago’s DePaul University say the campus is no longer a safe place for them because of a group that is demanding the University withdraw from any companies that work with Israel.
The anti-Semitic group, Students for Justice in Palestine, has been running a campaign called “DePaul Divest” and is trying to get students to vote for a non-binding resolution calling for the University to disconnect with anyone connected to Israel.
“This entire campaign and entire sit-in going on in the SAC (Schmitt Academic Center) is totally unsafe for Jewish students and I have had a lot of Jewish students text me and call me today and tell me they are not comfortable walking through that part of our campus, which is really disheartening,” a student called Rachel told reporters. (Her name has been withheld because of threats.) “About two months ago when SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) started the ‘DePaul Divest’ campaign, I no longer felt safe on this campus and I no longer felt I could be a proud Jewish student.”
Another student said that she feels targeted and is always having to defend her Jewish faith.
“I do kind of feel as a Jewish student that I am being targeted on campus. I feel that a lot of questions are being directed to me and I am constantly on the defensive on campus,” she explained. “I have to defend myself, my Judaism, my pride in Israel every day and it’s getting a little bit exhausting.”
“I’d like to live and go to a university where everybody can have their own opinions and have a diverse community and feel safe.”
The Students for Justice in Palestine has been found to have conducted anti-Semitic actions on campuses across the U.S. At New York University, they slid “Eviction Notices” under the doors of Jewish students and a similar incident at Northeastern University led to SJP being suspended from campus.
SJP would not respond to reporter questions about harassment of Jewish students.
A Whitney, Texas church has won a temporary injunction against a school district that had refused to allow the church on their grounds for a Bible study.
Judge F.B. McGregor ruled that Prairie Valley Baptist Church has the same rights to rent the school for after-school clubs and meetings because other community groups are given the opportunity.
The church’s associate pastor and youth minister had contacted the school district last December to hold an after-school Bible study at Whitney High School. The school’s Superintendent, Gene Solis, contacted the church before the application was even formally submitted, saying he was rejecting the request because if the church was allowed to use the facilities then “fringe groups” could also use them.
Pastor Drew Tucker said he asked the Superintendent to reconsider and then presented the request to the school board. Superintendent Solis then urged the board to reject the request because the Bible study would be illegal and violate school board policy.
After the Liberty Institute contacted the school, the pastor applied again only to be denied because the school claimed it would cause a traffic congestion problem.
The court ruled the Bible study could take place while the case moves through the court system. The Liberty Institute praised the court’s decision, saying that it follows well-established federal and state laws on the free exercise of religion.
The Broward County School District has finally backed down from their ban of the Bible being read by students during “free reading” time.
The school had backed the teacher who told a student that he could not read the Bible in her classroom despite being contacted by multiple legal groups informing the district of the student’s Constitutional right to possess the Bible in the classroom and to read it when students were told to read a book of their choice.
The school then tried to say the problem was that the reading was part of the school’s “Accelerated Reader Program” time and the Bible wasn’t approved. The school was later found to have been lying because all 66 books of the Bible were approved for ARP.
Now, School Board Deputy General Counsel Marylin Batista-McNamara has informed the Liberty Institute that not only is the Bible approved to be read during the ARP time but also that staff has undergone training regarding the First Amendment rights of students.
The Liberty Institute says they will continue to monitor the situation to make sure the teacher who initiated the problems does not try to repeat their actions.
A Florida school district is responding to the release of a video showing two students beating another student by putting armed police on busses.
“We are going to have order on that bus one way or another,” said Dick Mullenax, head of the Polk County School Board. “We provide transportation to those schools, but if they can’t behave, we will see where we go from there.”
The video shows two students beating a third until they knocked out their victim with a sucker punch.
A spokesman for the sheriff’s office says that while the measure seems a little shocking at first, it’s necessary on a temporary basis to protect the safety of the children. They also believe that having the deputies on the bus gives them a chance to build relationships with the students that could lead to benefits in the future.
“They’re not going to be these hard-core monitors, they’re just going to be there, have a chance to interact with those kids, maybe get some information with things that are going on, It’s not going to be an adversarial relationship,” Sheriff’s Office spokesman Scott Wilder said.
A group of cheerleaders at a school in Kountze, Texas were told by a court they can continue to display Bible verses at football games, but their attorney may still appeal the decision.
Attorney Hiram Sasser says the ruling doesn’t clearly protect the rights of the students to continue using the verses in the future.
“I don’t think it provides any protection for the religious liberties of Kountze cheerleaders in the future,” Sasser said.
The court dismissed the suit saying it was now moot because the school district had changed their policies and because the ban was repealed the cheerleaders no longer had standing to advance their case.
The suit began in 2012 when the anti-Christian Freedom From Religion Foundation threatening the school because cheerleaders would hold up banners for the football team to run through that contained Bible verses.