Education Briefs
With homeschooling on the rise as well as defections from public schools for other educational alternatives, school districts are instituting efforts to lure students back. Homeschool numbers show no sign of dropping off and public schools are scrambling to stop the bleeding as tax dollars decline with every lost student. Nationwide, districts are reporting lagging enrollment.
This summer, Colorado's Adams 14 School District north of Denver initiated a $43,500 advertising campaign to attract students using billboards. New superintendent Karla Loria went a step further, going door-to-door in search of "missing" students. Her outreach paid off, but despite all this the district's enrollment is down five percent. In Texas, where the increase in homeschooling families has been described as "off the charts," the Dallas Independent School District enrollment is down by about 12,000 students. In Oregon's Buncombe County, lost students are costing the district nearly $4,600 each and, in that state's largest school district, enrollment has fallen more than three percent. North Carolina is reporting a five percent overall drop in public school enrollment, with kindergarten numbers down 15 percent. Washington Examiner, 8-27-21; Colorado Sun, 8-22-21
A Fairfax County, Virginia public school promoted videos called "Woke Kindergarten 60 Second Texts" for a second-grade summer learning program. The Bailey Elementary School for the Arts posted one of the videos — "Safe," by Ki — on its website, then promptly removed it when a whistleblower called attention to it. The video advances CRT themes under the guise of reassuring kids that "we all deserve to feel safe." 
The video narrative suggests a number of places where kids deserve to feel safe, such as "home," with "a partner" — a rather odd example to give young children. But the kicker is when the childish voice of the narrator says: "I feel safe when there are no police," with the obvious implication that police pose a danger to children. A spokesperson for the district claimed the video was posted by mistake and taken down when it was discovered, but a "Fairfax County Summer Learning 2021" guide for second-graders includes these videos in a list of "Mentor Texts for Writing." The school's website also reportedly included links and topics such as "Black Lives Matter, tools for teaching Critical Race Theory, New York Times articles which discuss white parents are what's wrong within public schools, antiracism tools for teachers and a collection of social media accounts to check out that further discuss and implement similar ideas." Safe, by Ki, YouTube; Defending Education.org/Copy-of-G2-Summer-Learning-2021.pdf; Fox News.com, 8-5-21; Fairfax Times.com
Wisconsin's Gateway Technical College has a message for interested Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) scholarship students: White males need not apply. SC Johnson, "The Family Company," offers a scholarship program called the SC Johnson STEM Scholarship Program at Gateway, which has a total value of $45,000 after four years. This means scholarship recipients are awarded $7,500 for each of their two years at the technical college, then $7,500 for each of two additional years after they transfer to a four-year college or university. Additionally, scholarship recipients qualify for a guaranteed matching amount from the four-year institution.
This life-altering opportunity is essentially denied to white males if their families earn more than $50,000 per year, but there is no such income restriction for women or members of other racial groups. Asian men, for example, are overrepresented in the STEM program but not held to the same income restrictions. SC Johnson denies any intent to discriminate, using as its excuse: "This scholarship is designed to create pathways to greater economic and social mobility for those with limited financial means and for those who have been historically underrepresented in high-demand STEM fields. It does not exclude people based on gender or race." When The College Fix asked for research "pointing to a family income of $50,000 as the line of demarcation for material success in life for white men, they received no response from either SC Johnson or Gateway Technical College. The College Fix.com/STEM Scholarship
The Independent Women's Forum says today's freshman orientation "serves as a crash-course on how to navigate the politically correct halls of higher education, where words are violence, gender is a choice, and all whites are racist." The Women's Forum published five lies colleges and universities teach freshman students before they even step foot in a classroom. Lie #1: "White privilege is real." Skin color is the most important factor about a student and "white, male Christians have it the easiest in life while all others are oppressed in some way." All are branded with a demographic that eclipses everything else. Lie #2: "Words are violence."
This serves to nullify the First Amendment and predisposes students either to keep their heads down and their mouths shut or to call each other out for the slightest "offense." Lie #3: "One in five coeds will be sexually assaulted." While this topic must be taken seriously, the "one-in-five stat has been debunked." At the same time, promiscuity is constantly promoted on most campuses. Lie #4: "Gender is a choice." College freshmen are coerced into "the complex and confusing world of preferred gender pronouns, such as ‘ze,' ‘hir,' and ‘xem.'" Students are informed about campus LGBTQ centers, which introduce them to hormone therapy and sometimes offer transgender medical coverage. Lie #5: "Being colorblind is racist." Most universities today teach kids that "the only way to not be a racist is to be actively anti-racist." Parents and students beware. Independent Women's Forum, 8-19-21
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