Tag: Florida

Vicious Teacher Leads Bullying of Disabled Child

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2008-05-28

8:07 pm

3 Comments on Vicious Teacher Leads Bullying of Disabled Child

News

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Teacher lets kinder­garten stu­dents vote 5‑year-old “out of the class”

After each class­mate was allowed to say what they did­n’t like about Bar­ton’s 5‑year-old son, Alex, his Morn­ing­side Ele­men­tary teacher Wendy Por­tillo said they were going to take a vote, Bar­ton said.

By a 14 to 2 mar­gin, the stu­dents vot­ed Alex — who is in the process of being diag­nosed with autism — out of the class.

The teacher, Wendy Por­tillo (portillow@stlucie.k12.fl.us), has acknowl­edged that the inci­dent hap­pened. She had been par­tic­i­pat­ing in the child’s IEP team since Feb­ru­ary, so she knew that Alex was being eval­u­at­ed for a dis­abil­i­ty (most like­ly Asberg­er’s syn­drome, from the infor­ma­tion in the article).

There isn’t be any excuse for any adult treat­ing any child that way, but a teacher to encour­age chil­dren to ostra­cize a dis­abled child? That’s even worse.

The school dis­trict has refused to fire Por­tillo, but claims that she has been moved to non-class­room duties. That isn’t near­ly enough.

Civil Rights Win in Florida

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2008-05-26

4:52 am

1 Comment on Civil Rights Win in Florida

Civil Rights, Education

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Months ago, I post­ed about Ponce de Leon High School in Flori­da ban­ning the wear or dis­play of any kind of gay pride sym­bols or words, claim­ing that they indi­cat­ed involve­ment in an “ille­gal orga­ni­za­tion.” I lat­er found out that the prob­lem start­ed last fall, when a les­bian stu­dent com­plained that she was being harassed. Instead of inves­ti­gat­ing or try­ing to stop the harass­ment, the school admin­is­tra­tion cracked down on any show of sup­port for her. The prin­ci­pal lat­er said that he was sure that gay pride sym­bols would cause stu­dents to visu­al­ize gay peo­ple hav­ing sex, lead­ing to dis­rup­tion.1

Any­way, Flori­da man­aged to get some­thing right, or at least one judge there did so. Oh, wait–he was a fed­er­al judge, not a state author­i­ty. Any­way, on May 13 he issued a per­ma­nent injunc­tion against the school! He told them that they must stop their uncon­sti­tu­tion­al cen­sor­ship of expres­sions of sup­port for gay peo­ple, and warned them not to try retal­i­at­ing against any­one involved in the case.

1 Damn, those are pow­er­ful rain­bows! Won­der what kind of porn they’d find in a raid of his house?

Rainbow Stickers = Gang Affiliations? Right

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2008-02-01

9:30 pm

5 Comments on Rainbow Stickers = Gang Affiliations? Right

Civil Rights, Education

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Yeah, I hear there’s a real prob­lem with queer street gangs these days, tag­ging every­thing in sight with those damned rainbows.

ACLU sues Flori­da school for bar­ring Pride gear

Admin­is­tra­tors at Ponce de Leon High School stat­ed that stu­dents’ wear­ing rain­bow stick­ers could mean that they are mem­bers of an ille­gal organization.…
An uniden­ti­fied stu­dent was sus­pend­ed for five days for express­ing her sup­port for gay rights, the ACLU said. Stu­dents said a les­bian peer was harassed and tried to report the sit­u­a­tion to admin­is­tra­tors. She was instead greet­ed with cen­sor­ship of sup­port­ing stu­dents writ­ing “gay pride” on their arms and notebooks. 

This sto­ry def­i­nite­ly goes in the “glad to be home­school­ing” file, but it also gives me cause to won­der if the school admin­is­tra­tor train­ing process sur­gi­cal­ly removes all com­mon sense. Or do they just pre­fer to recruit those who don’t have much of it in the first place?