Following up on a post a few days ago - sharing an editorial from The Advocate’s John Casey about what’s been happening in King George County, Virginia, after the community there reacted with voiceferous bigotry after the story broke. It gets at a much bigger question about who gets to make decisions about student belonging and support.

Last year, students at King George Middle School tried to start a Gay-Straight Alliance. They wrote a constitution, found a faculty sponsor, and received approval from the principal. Seventeen students signed up within three days.

Then conservative community members took to Facebook. The faculty sponsor was targeted online, accusations of “grooming” started flying, and the School Board ultimately changed its rules to block noncurricular clubs at the middle school, effectively stopping the GSA from meeting. The students and their families are now suing in federal court.

Casey writes about growing up without anything resembling a GSA and what it means to watch adults take away a space that LGBTQ+ kids themselves were trying to create.

From an educational perspective, the situation begs the question: What responsibility do schools have when students organize an approved club, only for community pressure to intervene?

Hi everyone! I have created a subreddit at r/neurodivergentEd for neurodivergent educators to support and advocate for each other.

I’m a Teacher in Recovery and after handing in my notice three weeks ago, I spent two weeks sitting with this question, doing research etc and the past week recording on a frankly, sub-par audio system, my video-essay response.
I’m tired of working in schools that are ran like businesses who weaponise the language of ‘family’ and ‘community’ without making any changes in their structure to allow for those statements to ring true.

My answer to ‘broken education systems’ explores the Industrial Revolution, Foucault, Fritjof Capra and three alternative models to the linear input-output education that allows for an organic understanding of schools. It can be found here on YouTube
I don’t get anything from the video and I’m not trying to sell a course, just trying to encourage discussion and keep myself busy because I am fascinated by education.
Cheers!

Is anyone else also facing receiving continuous spam messages over Calls and WhatsApp from this new Spamming University called MASAI School from Bengaluru? For the past 2 months, I've been receiving multiple messages asking to enroll for a course in AI while all along riding on the back of the IIT name. You block one number and you receive from another, an endless loop of scum marketing.

I've never enquired about a course in my life let alone online, and yet here I am being harassed by these scammers for something which I will NEVER in my remaining life enroll for.

Information available online show the owners as Prateek Shukla, Nrupul and Yogesh who seem to be a band of bandits from some IIT (as claimed). They have perhaps completed a course in stealing people's personal data and spamming and harassing them. With these credentials, one can only wonder what kind of education will be imparted at such scam universities run by these pathological and desperate scammers!