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The Peoria, Arizona Unified School District will let gay eighth grader Chris Quintanilla wear a “Rainbows Are Gay” wristband to school.
As we reported last month, Quintanilla’s principal instructed him to remove the wristband when he saw him wearing it in a school hallway.
The wristband ban was apparently part of a larger pattern of behavior on the principal’s part. According to Quintanilla’s mother Natali, when she expressed concern that her son was being harassed at school for being gay, the principal told her that he wouldn’t be a target “if he didn’t put it out there the way he does.”
But the ACLU is now claiming victory, saying that the district “has assured the American Civil Liberties Union that it will no longer prevent [Quintanilla] from wearing [the] wristband at school.”
The district, for its part, says the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding. Why it took them more than a month to clear it up remains unclear.
Last month I wrote about a DA threatening high school students with child porn prosecutions for taking photos of themselves on their cell phones.
Now comes word of another prosecutor abusing his authority in a teen “sexting” case, this time harassing a high school administrator.
The story starts in March 2008: Ting-Yi Oei, an assistant principal in Virginia, is investigating sexting at his school. He confiscates an underwear snap from a student’s cellphone. He can’t identify the person in the photo, so he reports to his principal and closes the investigation.
When he suspends that student for an unrelated offense a couple of weeks later, the student’s mother calls the cops.
Prosecutors investigate, charge him with failure to report child abuse. That charge isn’t going anywhere, because he made a full report to his principal. So they charge him with child pornography. They delay informing him of the charges so they can have him arrested at school on his first day back after summer vacation.
The media run stories, with his photo, saying he’s been arrested for child porn. He’s placed on leave. Television news crews stalk him. Prosecutors press him to resign. He racks up a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in legal bills.
Finally, three weeks ago — even months after his arrest, and nearly a year after Oei first talked to the cops — a judge throws the charges out, finding Oei has broken no laws.
A dispute over a controversial issue of a conservative student newspaper is boiling over at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
The March-April issue of The Minuteman, a right-wing UMass student publication, contained both an investigative article on the budget of a campus group called Student Bridges and an insipid humor piece that ridiculed the appearance of one of that group’s leaders.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has distributed a video in which, it claims, “hundreds of copies of The Minuteman are stolen out of the hands of a student intending to distribute the paper.” The student holding the video does not appear to resist or object when other students take copies of the paper from him, however, and in one of the few clear pieces of audio in the footage a conservative student is heard saying, with amusement, “This is amazing. This is amazing footage, I’ve gotta say.”
Subsequent to that videotaped confrontation, the UMass student government association passed a resolution calling upon the Silent Majority, publishers of The Minuteman, to apologize for what it characterized as “slanderous defamation of character,” and raising the possibility of the suspension of the group’s charter if it didn’t comply.
At the next week’s meeting of the SGA, this past Wednesday, a member of the student government was ejected in the wake of a dispute over whether a second resolution, rescinding the first, could be placed on the agenda.
This story doesn’t look like it’s done yet. Check back for more in the days to come.
Arizona State University has a big commencement speaker, and a big PR problem.
Last Wednesday the State Press, ASU’s student newspaper, broke the story that the university would not be giving President Obama an honorary degree when he speaks at their commencement next month, and ASU has been scrambling ever since.
A university spokesperson told the State Press that honorary degrees are bestowed on the basis of a lifetime of achievement, and that “because President Obama’s body of work is yet to come, it’s inappropriate to recognize him at this time.” Since then, however, research has revealed that ASU has given honorary degrees in the past to humorist Erma Bombeck, Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo, and a long list of the university’s major donors.
On Friday ASU president Michael Crow offered a new explanation for the honorary degree decision. In an email to students, he said that the university does not grant honorary degrees “to sitting politicians, a practice based on the very practical realities of operating a public university in our political environment,” but criticism continued to mount.
Crow tried a new tack the next day, announcing that one of the university’s scholarship programs would be renamed the “President Barack Obama Scholars program.” Crow’s statement also declared that the program would be expanded, but as the State Press reported, it “did not say how much the scholarship program will be expanded or when it will begin.”
In an editorial to be published in tomorrow’s paper, the State Press notes that the university’s decision has sparked a round of ASU-bashing in the national media, with students bearing the brunt.
“ASU has been labeled,” it says, “a school where students go to get ‘a master’s degree in lawn-mowing.’ It has been labeled a second-rate university. It has been labeled a racist party school.” All because of a “decision made by a six-person committee.”
A decision, the State Press is too modest to point out, that the nation only learned about because of the intrepid work of the university’s student journalists.
Earlier reports on this morning’s New School occupation can be found here.
The New School has released a statement to the media on what it calls this morning’s “break in at 65 Fifth Avenue.” The action was not “a simple political protest,” according to the statement, since the protesters’ “entry into this building was forced, they removed a man who was cleaning the building, took his phone, injured a security officer, and did physical damage to the building.”
In the statement, the New School confirms that it asked the NYPD “to remove and arrest those who were trespassing on our property,” and declares that all New School students involved have been suspended effective immediately.
The New School Free Press, a student newspaper, reports that in addition to the nineteen people arrested inside the building, at least one New School student and one NYU student were “maced and arrested” at about 11:30 this morning. There is no confirmation of the charge that police used tear gas and pepper spray inside 65 Fifth Avenue as they retook the building.
Click “Read the rest of this entry” for afternoon updates.
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