Prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia failed to notify top students in a timely manner that they had received National Merit Scholar certificates, and Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears is furious. The school dragged its feet for months before notifying students of the awards — which were announced last May — and then simply dropped the certificates off at their desks without announcement or fanfare. These awards are only given to the top three percent of high school seniors in the United States and they provide recipients with an advantage when applying to universities and colleges. According to Conservative America Today, Sears has asked Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares “to open a formal investigation” into the matter. When the foot-dragging came to light, Sears, who is black, tweeted: “This is reprehensible. Our children’s education is not a zero-sum game. We cannot punish success to have ‘equal outcomes at all costs.’” Some parents of affected students believe the school’s withholding notification of the awards “was driven by the obsession with the ‘woke’ ideology’s demand for ‘equity.’” Parent Shawnna Yashar said her son lost out on being able to list this important merit award on his college applications because he didn’t find out about it until November 2022 and his applications were due in late October. When Yashar complained, the school’s director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, told her that Thomas Jefferson “wants to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements.” Yashar and the other parents disagree, charging that refusal to notify students of the awards amounts to “theft by the state.”

In December, The Washington Stand reported on what it calls the little-known movement of transgender people “detransitioning” from the lifestyle. While the transgender explosion has shown no signs of stopping in recent years, “a related but much less highlighted trend is simultaneously occurring — a movement almost completely ignored by the mainstream media,” which is the “detransitioner” movement. Last October, Reuters.com wrote about an analysis showing that “at least 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria from 2017 through 2021.” But Reuters and others neglect to report on new studies also showing that transgender youth are detransitioning at rates higher than activists admit. The Post Millennial reported on the Re/Detrans Canada event, held at York University in Ontario in November 2022, where researcher Kinnon Ross MacKinnon presented studies that show “detransition rates far higher than the oft-cited ‘less than 1 percent’ statistic that proponents of gender-affirming care for minors are so fond of repeating.” For example, while one study from the Netherlands showed a detransition rate of just two percent, “a similar study from the U.S. showed an almost 30 percent detransition rate.” Three studies from England showed rates “between 6.9 and 9.8 percent.” According to The Washington Stand writer Dan Hart, the online discussion forum Reddit has a “Detrans” chatroom (or “Subreddit”) which currently has over 40,000 members. “While the causes for gender dysphoria are often complex and multifaceted,” noted Hart, “cultural and institutional influences beholden to a pro-transgender ideology have become primary contributors to the confusion over biological sex that is occurring among thousands of adolescents. The power that social media has to shape the minds of young people who have experienced abuse and are looking for affirmation is readily apparent [in the accounts of many detransitioners], along with the potent influence that medical and psychiatric professionals have in pushing their young patients down a path of gender transition drugs and surgical procedures that often create irreversible physiological harm.”

Community colleges across the country are experiencing staffing shortages due to a ripple effect from the pandemic, having lost 13 percent of their employees from January 2020 through April 2022. Inside Higher Ed.com reported on the problem this month, noting that while four-year institutions essentially recovered their losses following the pandemic, community colleges “have lagged.” The higher education consulting firm EAB collected the data, and along with the League for Innovation in the Community College, “an organization dedicated to helping community colleges innovate to improve student success outcomes,” aired its findings publicly in December. EAB Director of Strategic Research, Tara Zirkel, says community college staffs “are now too small to carry out necessary college functions after employees left for higher-paying roles at four-year universities or in private industry, or sought out jobs with remote options or more flexible work schedules....” The losses affect all community college staffing levels, from IT personnel to cafeteria workers to faculty, with faculty members “in career and technical education fields proving particularly difficult to retain as private sector employers offer higher pay to fill their own workforce gaps.” This development is particularly distressing for high school graduates who for many reasons are not planning to enroll in a four-year institution. Some community colleges, such as the Colorado Community College System, say they are trying to address the problem with more competitive wages. Tara Zirkel believes it’s important that campus leaders start to address attrition and recruitment problems now. “Given demographic shifts and the decline in the number of working-age adults,” she said, “community colleges will be forced to vie for an increasingly limited pool of candidates, which means continuing to go head to head with private industries and universities. This is not just a right-now problem,” she adds. “This is an into-the-future problem.” Many parents and students are counting on their community colleges to solve it.

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