Our Children are Being Destroyed

Parents everywhere are celebrating as they send their maskless children off to school this week! Hurrah, hoozah, yippee! Everything is back to normal in our schools.

Except it’s not.

Our children are being destroyed, little by little.

The destruction started in 2020 with closing schools to in person attendance. Kids were sent home, virtual learning was organized, and school became something you did at your kitchen table by yourself or with Mom or Dad looking on. It was better than no school at all, but not much better.

Then 2021 rolled around and local school boards, eventually under the cover of the overreaching State School Board and with the cooperation of the Health Department, implemented mask mandates, testing, quarantine policies, etc. Students who had already fallen behind academically were now experiencing great mental distress due to all these measures. But there was something else, something school systems didn’t want anyone to know.

Because the mental distress was not just about Covid, it was because of the increase in violence in our schools during that same time. Need proof?

Recently, I’ve been given information about what is going on in our local schools. It is shocking.

(All of these events/examples have been corroborated via the press, school and public officials, and various staff.)

• Multiple bomb/gun threats called into both middle and high schools, causing schools to be evacuated and closed.
• High School students attack administrators and send one to the hospital with a head injury.
• Middle school students fight and in one fight, a student is sent to the hospital with a serious injury.
• Middle school students are discovered having oral sex in the stairways.
• Middle school students are bringing “edibles” to school. ( If you don’t know what edibles are, ask someone from Colorado.)
• Elementary student brings a large knife to school planning to hurt someone and the student is taken home by the Principal and the incident is not reported to police/central office for at least two days. Principal does not get fired. The student returns to class with no consequences.
• Students as young as 4 years old run up and down the halls and curse at other students, teachers, and anyone they see with the “F” word and the “N” word. They often knock down other students.
• Elementary students having violent temper tantrums and destroy property including walls, floors, etc. Social workers and administrators stand by and watch and admonish other staff when they suggest something be done. I believe the phrase was something like, “Stay in your lane.” This costs money to the system as they have to repair the damages.
• Elementary students are allowed to run wild in the lunch room and jump onto lunch tables putting themselves and others in danger. In the hallways they are allowed to swing heavy book bags over their heads endangering other students. Again, administrators do NOTHING and the social workers let the kids, “work out their anger.”
• Classrooms are cleared when a student has a violent fit. The children in that class lose class and academic time.
• Students are removed from classes by social workers without proper notification to the teacher. This is a violation of county policy and a potential disaster if a real emergency occurs in the school.
• Students post an Instagram account with videos of different fights in the high school. Administrators know about the site.

Wow. That’s a long list for a county with just two high schools, two middle schools, and five elementary schools. And these occurred in the first six months of school. Again, all of these have been confirmed by reliable sources and, in some cases, the local newspaper.

Is it fair to expect a Superintendent, administration or Board of Education to do anything about all of this? Maybe not. After all, with all they have had to deal with in the last three years, they are stressed and overburdened. It’s difficult to keep your head in the sand while disaster is evident all around you.

Remember, these are experienced, award-winning educators. People who consider themselves competent and who have six figure salaries. And yet, as far as we can tell, they haven’t addressed any of this. How they can pretend all is well with our kids is beyond me. How they can lie to the faces of parents is unforgiveable.

There have been a few emails from schools regarding the incidents that were in the paper. Parents were not notified about all the rest.

We can give them a pass for the events of 2020. The virtual school and all the other crap that happened that year was unexpected and they had no plan for those.

But it’s 2022 and the excuses are off the table.

Administrators in the county had the children and teachers back in school ( albeit masked) and have been given tons of money to operate since the Spring of 2020. That was the reason for the mask mandates after all! Yet, these intolerable acts of violence were going on and for some reason or another, Talbot County Administrators chose to ignore them even when they were told about them specifically by witnesses. In some cases, as in the high school/middle school attacks, they couldn’t hide them from the press. The other incidents got swept under the rug faster than mouse turds in an expensive restaurant.

Why? Because they could. They had political cover.

In the past year or so, many parents were busy fighting the mask mandates and the coercion of their children to get vaccinated. Too busy to question what else was going on in schools. But now the mandates are gone, the vaccine push has been slightly muted, and the bureaucrats are hoping parents won’t notice the other stuff. They might be right.

Many parents have been fooled into thinking things are back to normal in the schools. They are not. Sadly, they are long way away from normal.

The children are being destroyed, academically and mentally. All the indicators show it.

The other day, a parent from another county had a post on social media. It started like this,”Should I/we be concerned?” Then the parent shared the statistic that only 19% of the students in Maryland “met expectations” in English on recent State tests. Only 10% in Math. The parent said, “This just looks very disheartening.”

The usual suspects chimed in that this was just an assessment for teachers to use to aid their teaching and that the test was given in the Fall, so we should ignore it.( It’s funny how they want you to pay attention to test scores when they use them to fuel increased funding to address what THEY consider important)

But please, don’t use test scores to hold them accountable.

After all, they are blaming Covid for those also.

Funny, because some parents have been asking about the loss of academic progress for a while. Some even had suggestions for how the students could get back on track. They were ignored and in some cases, ridiculed.

But with all these extremely skilled educators, no one at a local or state level has provided one single proposal to get the kids “caught up” after the disaster in the public schools for nearly two years. How dare the parents speak up. Damn domestic terrorists.

So now, with the incidents of violence listed above and the dismal test scores, are you getting the picture that masks were just a part of the larger problem in the public schools?

And now let’s go here. Consider these stats:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that from April through October of last year, the number of children 5-11 years old visiting hospital emergency departments in 2020 rose 24% from 2019. Among 12 -17 year olds, the number increased by 31%. And those were the kids who went to the ER for mental issues. How many just went to counselors? How many of them got no help?

Boston Children’s Hospital reported a 40 percent increase of children with suicidal thoughts or attempts.

More bad news. Of course, much of the Covid grant money went to provide mental health help for children. However, the effectiveness is debatable if counselors and psychologists in schools are just there to watch children explode, destroy property, and threaten other students.

Don’t look to the legislature either. They just passed this:

If you look at this picture, you may recognize that this is House Bill 84 from the Maryland Legislature. And look whose name is on it. Why, its Delegate Ruth, our good old friend who proposed an advisory board for Homeschooling in Maryland, the lady who told us that this advisory board would only exist to give homeschoolers a voice. Hmmm.

What is this bill that was so happily passed by Democrats?

Basically it’s a bill that PROHIBITS, yes, PROHIBITS kids from being removed from classrooms, etc. if they are being violent. The “rationale” is that this will protect kids who get in fights in classrooms from having a “criminal” record. Or maybe that kid that destroys school property. And we wonder why our kids are in mental distress?

Our children are being destroyed and no one is acting.

They are asking for more money, mainly to do the same ineffective things they have been doing for over thirty years.

A couple of weeks ago I presented information to a group of parents/citizens about the Blueprint for Education in Maryland. I’ve also written about it in a previous blog post. It’s a part of the massive Kirwan educational spending program approved in 2020 that will double the public school costs per pupil by 2032 from approximately $15,000 per student to $30,000. It will also increase county taxes by approximately 24%.

Kirwan funding is nothing new. It’s been around for at least 20 years. And, during that time the millions that were spent brought us to where we are today.

And this new “Blueprint” brings in additional funding that will force counties to increase the tax burden on their citizens to an extent never seen before. If they don’t do it, there will be an unelected oversight board in place to force their hands. Why, each county will even have their own “Blueprint” Coordinator, someone who will ride herd on elected county officials. More middle level management comprised of unelected bureaucrats.

(In a county that is currently short by more than ten employees, some of them teachers, it seems wasteful to have a person hired to do this. I wonder which well- connected relative of a county official might get this job?)

There are all kinds of other really cool, expensive “bells and whistles” in this bill. The opportunity for waste and corruption will be astronomical.

And not one of these are innovative, original, or proven ideas to get students back to where they need to be academically or emotionally. It’s all a deja vu of bad Progressive policies reformatted and reintroduced despite a record of utter failure in the past. Here’s the link: ( https://tcps.k12.md.us/blueprint-for-marylands-future/)

In this document, you’ll see the Head Start, Pre-school for All, Promise Neighborhoods, Teach For America, Race to the Top, College Scorecard, and a variety of other liberal initiatives of the past. It’s like one of those CD’s of one hit wonders they advertise on late night television!

Many of them were in place for decades, some for longer. None of them are successful in anything other than creating bureaucracy, indoctrination, corruption. They are not called by the same names now, but in the “history of now” Progressives hope you won’t recognize those old standards under new, pricier, labels.

Our children won’t be helped by any of it, the destruction will continue.

In the end, it always comes down to what we, the public, the parents, will do to stop it. I wish I could say that I think people will stand up and fight. Unfortunately, since the masks have been removed it seems people are willing to take that small “win” and go home.

I hope they won’t. I hope they sign up for every school board meeting from now on and speak about what is going on. I hope they will seek information about EVERYTHING that goes on in schools and hold the administration and the Board accountable. I hope they ask every single Board, County Council, State and National Rep candidate tough questions about how they will implement real and inspired solutions (yeah, it’s Hannity, I know.).

I hope they won’t mince words and cut right to the point. No threats, no cursing, no name calling, but honest and direct conversations. I hope they will research every bill and proposal, every dime spent, every position added.

Even more, I hope they run for office. They still have time to file.

Our children are being destroyed.

It needs to stop. De-masking is just one small step.

https://www.oann.com/doctors-declare-national-emergency-in-childrens-mental-health/

They made darn sure no parent would get to see what was actually being taught in their child’s classroom. They even banned parents from watching virtual lessons.