I would like to add an encore to my rant. Everything is not as good as it should be. Not even close.

In the Elememtary school the kindergartens grew from 2 classes to 7 classes in the last 7 years because of our success. A small older red brick building was once crowded but adequate. Now half the students are in trailers. The school has one of the highest average scores on national achievement tests in the state and stacks up well academically against almost any school in the country and still attracts the best teachers in the system. It does have about 10-15% of students bused in from the less affluent neighborhoods with high numbers of dependent minorites. No plans on the board to expand the physical buildings of the school. PTA can raise some money but not enough to rebuild the entire school building.

The Jr High had a retired marine officer for a principle for a couple years. He was a large extremely intimidating African American guy. He kicked about a third of the studentbody out, most of them literally. He was greatly feared and was not above using military discipline tactics. Yelling loudly, push-ups, grabbing hoodlums around the neck and putting them up against a wall. He solved the discipline and drug problems. My hat is off to him. But eventually he went too far and had to step down for being too abusive too often. He was replaced by a tough woman who uses other psychological methods which are legal but don’t work as well.

The Jr High building is falling down. Every Spring the teachers are told, this is the last year the building will be used and they allow the students to go wild with spray paint on the last day of school. Then to the chagrin of everybody the money for a new building disappears and we get one more year with the old building. This has happened three times and they are digging a hole in the footballl field right now so maybe this will be the last year. For now the building seems like a prison or a dungeon. It has a leaky roof, the heating and AC don’t work. When it rains hard the basement classrooms flood. The orchestra room had a few inches of water on the floor for several days last spring. Musicians defiantly wore beach flip-flops and shorts to school. Katrina refugees should feel right at home this year. Good thing the cellos had those long metal spikes on their lower end, it keeps them up out of the water. The football players who were hitting each other over the head with their basses also found it quite amusing and convenient to fill the bases up with water from the floor and then dump it on some poor probably Asian musician up on the front row. For the record this Jr High orchestra won first place in the state in Savannah last Spring in spite of their difficulties and my daughter was the first violinist. Jr High is a crazy time.

The high school is only slightly better, the building is as old. Following Katrina about 200 extra students quietly enrolled in the school sending the individual class rosters over 40 in nearly every case. No extra money is forthcoming from FEMA for this added expense. Armed police and the drug “puppies” are a regular fixture. About 50% of the students walking around the halls look just like the worst street thugs/sluts in the inner city. The county decided to save money this year and did not have any AC in August when school started. Some days were 90 degrees F with 90% humidity, although most of the time the humidity/temperature has been pleasant. This morning I notice the temperature dropped to 29 degrees F and the County policy is that they will not turn any heat on in the schools until after Thanksgiving. Kids will wear mittens and sweaters to class today. The smart asses will wear those fur lined Alaskan parkas or Nazi style trench coats and get away with it. Violins will not be in tune in the orchestra.

The PTA is raising cain on all of these fronts and it is a continual battle with some victories and some defeats. It is hardest at the high school level and least successful. I think the high school is rather crappy and I have mixed feelings about it.

For me the key is that the school has this track system. Both of my kids are in the most advanced track where they get the best teachers who really want to challenge and teach these kids and the class size is around 15. I look at the situation class by class and I can’t see where I could do any better with a private school in the crucial areas like math, science, english. They could have a nicer physical facility and be away fom their friends of many years. In public schools my kids see the problems rampant in every large city; at lunch time, in PE classes, at assemblies and the extra-cirricular activities but not in the important classes. I think it might be good for them to learn at a very young age how to deal with the violent dependent whiny American underclass and it has made them into very conservative little republicans in spite of their parents’ moderate/liberal leanings. You’d think they listen to Rush but I know they are in school at that time.

My kids seem to be thriving for the moment and do really well on national achievement tests and they have selected out good friends. If they were more interested in competitive sports they might have a better chance at a smaller school, some of the athletes in this high school will make it at the college and possibly even at the professional level. We have spent 10 years working hard in non-LDS volunteer orgainzations like cub/boy/girl scouts, sports, music and it has paid off. If my kids were getting into trouble, or not getting good grades, or having problems with drugs, truancy, or other forms of delinquency (beyond the occasional sassy mouths common at that age) I would second mortguage the house if necessary and put them in a private school. Both of them have this odd pride in not being “preppie” and yet doing well academically. The continual threat of being “demoted” to an expensive prep school keeps them working hard. It works for us so far. But it would not work for everybody.

Over all it seems to me that American public education is creaking to a slow death and it will be a big blow to the future hopes of this great nation. When and where to run like rats from the sinking ship and when to fight and make it work and when is that only like straightening out the chairs on the Titanic is hard to tell. More of us need to fight to save this tottering ship.

MORE ON THE 9TH CIRCUIT [Robert Alt]
I’ll be on Fox News’ “Big Story Weekend” this Sunday at 10 pm to discuss the Ninth Circuit’s sex-survey-for-seven-year-olds case. I generally agree with Andy’s conclusion yesterday that the court was right in not finding a new or modified Substantive Due Process right in the Constitution for parents to control material to which their children are exposed at school (indeed, this properly limited understanding of Substantive Due Process is why I respectfully disagreed with Andy’s appeal to Substantive Due Process as a ground for relief in the Schiavo case). The problem with Judge Reinhardt’s opinion is that it quite simply does not comport with his own Substantive Due Process jurisprudence. This is a judge who has found a Substantive Due Process right to commit suicide and for prisoners to ship semen (with the facilitation of prison officials) to their girlfriends so that they can procreate while behind bars. Yet somehow when he is confronted with a case that seeks to extend in a far more modest way some of the earliest Substantive Due Process cases—cases which recognized a right to send your child to private school and preventing the state from dictating private school curricula—he finds religion. Again, I think that he reaches the right decision based on the law, but I also think that he is disingenuous when he states that the court makes this decision based on law rather than policy preferences. Based on the rank inconsistency in Judge Reinhardt’s Substantive Due Process jurisprudence, the only reasonable conclusion is that his decision was predicated specifically on his liberal policy preferences.
Posted at 07:49 AM

That’s the long and short of it.

Good to hear from you. Hope you are enjoying NM. I’m not saying that I agree with everything that Judge Reinhardt does, etc, but I do have to say that he was quite respectful of our Judge and I was pretty darn impressed with a lot of what he did when we were on panel with him. Say what you will about his judicial opinions, etc, (and I know that he and your judge don’t get along that well, so I’ll give you that one), but for what we did on panel with him, during some fairly ideology driven cases on calendar, I was actually impressed. I guess maybe I had such low expectations, and he turned out to be pretty darn good on a lot of things (and, one of my best friends from law school was clerking for him at the time, and I learned a lot about him through her).

My only point through this whole thing is that, while I really think that school board gone done wrong… I fail to see the constitutional right (and I think a lot of people have said that as well). The lawyers on this should have gone for a good ol’ state tort action – intentional infliction of emotional distress, etc – and maybe would have had a prayer. But the reasoning – or at least the way the law is right now, I fail to see the 1983 action – and even if there was a violation, that darn school board would have qualified immunity, because it wasn’t clearly established that they had violated some constitutional right. In that sense, I think the opinion is pretty darn bulletproof, and I can bet you that most conservative judges would have seen it the same way. But, now that I’m a lowly district court clerk, I’m not privy to those lofty discussions anymore, so I only get my two cents here. I’ve enjoyed the discussion – and thanks to Matt for pointing this all out in the first place – I’m sure that we could get a rousing EQ discussion going tomorrow in church on this.

Adam – hope NM treats you right (and I’m just biding my time till I see you come out there as Senator or Congressman Greenwood…)

Hugs and kisses from the district of Utah…

Kolob Canyon

You’ll be heartened to learn that the Mormon women of Montgomery County, Maryland, were instrumental in getting our leftist school board to drop the offensive sex ed curriculum it adopted last year.

Howdy, Stew. Wish I could say your reaction was universal.