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Connecticut eighth grader Patrick Abbazia attended classes wrapped in duct tape Friday morning to protest his East Shore Midddle School’s “no touching” policy.
Earlier in the week, East Shore principal Catherine Williams sent home a letter telling parents that “physical contact is prohibited to keep all students safe in the learning environment.” The announcement was prompted by an incident in which a student required medical attention after being kicked in the groin, but the letter specifically banned “hugging” and “horseplay” as well.
Contacted by the Connecticut Post, Williams said she was “only concerned about unsafe behaviors,” but Abbazia claimed teachers had told him that high-fives and pats on the back were out of bounds as well. Superintendent of Schools Harvey Polansky told the paper that principals would use their discretion in interpreting the policy.
Abbazia had a friend tape his torso at the shoulders and elbows while he was waiting for the school bus, and kept the tape on until fourth period, just after noon. School officials called his father in for a conference, telling him that Patrick had misunderstood the policy.
The elder Abbazia told a reporter that he supported his son’s actions. “He is using his freedom as an American citizen to protest,” he said. “Those are the kind of people who get ahead in the world.”
The Observer, the University of Notre Dame’s student newspaper, says its student readers strongly support the selection of President Obama as ND’s 2009 commencement speaker.
Of the 282 letters it has received from students on the subject, the Observer says that nearly three-quarters — 73 percent — support the decision to invite the president. Among graduating seniors, the core audience for the speech, a full 97 support are supportive. Alumni opinion on the address is a near mirror-image of student views, however, with 70 percent of 313 alumni correspondents opposing Obama’s presence at commencement.
On Wednesday, a coalition of Notre Dame student groups announced their “deepest opposition” to the decision to invite Obama. That coalition included Notre Dame Right to Life, The Irish Rover Student Newspaper, Notre Dame College Republicans, The University of Notre Dame Anscombe Society, Notre Dame Identity Project, Militia of the Immaculata, Children of Mary, Orestes Brownson Council, Notre Dame Law School Right to Life, Notre Dame Law St Thomas More Society, and The Federalist Society at Notre Dame Law School.
Exit polls show that President Obama won the Catholic vote in November by a nine-point margin, two points greater than his victory in the electorate as a whole.
An appeals court in Mexico has found that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute former Mexican president Luis Echeverria in the 1968 mass killings of student protesters in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square. Echeverria was the head of the federal police at the time of the massacre.
Federal agents fired on a peaceful pro-democracy protest in Tlatelolco Square on the evening of October 2, 1968, days before the start of the Mexico City Olympics. Five thousand students and others were participating in the rally, and estimates of the number of dead range into the hundreds. (The official government tally was just thirty.)
The killings provoked an appalled response from Mexico’s citizens, and helped to spur a new resistance to the country’s repressive government. Mexico’s current president, Ernesto Zedillo, has called 1968 “the watershed of the country’s political life, when a real public outcry began for a more democratic country.”
Echeverria served as president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Since 2006 he had been held under house arrest in connection with the Tlatelolco Square killings.
A statement from Amnesty International yesterday called the court’s ruling “a symptom of the failure of successive Mexican governments and legislatures, as well as the courts and prosecutors, to live up to Mexico’s international human rights commitments.”
As we’ve noted before, the New School In Exile, a student activist group at New York City’s New School university, has pledged to shut the school down on April 1 if university president Bob Kerrey doesn’t resign. With that deadline now just five days away and Kerrey still ensconced in the president’s office, NSIE is preparing for a showdown.
The group has held several events this week, including a co-sponsored student-faculty forum at NYU, a staged reading of a short satirical play about Kerrey (now online), and a party late yesterday night.
They’ve scheduled a “student gathering and planning meeting” for six o’clock Sunday evening, though they’re tight-lipped about just what it is that’s being planned — their calendar for next Wednesday reads as follows: “[insert your action here], lots of fun, anarchy and playfulness. Don’t miss it.”
Hans and Sophie Scholl have long been student activist heroes of mine. The Scholls were members of the White Rose, a tiny group of German opponents of the Nazi regime. Hans was a veteran, and he and his sister were both students at the University of Munich, where they were caught scattering pamphlets on February 18, 1943. Four days later the two were tried, convicted, and guillotined, along with their friend and ally Christoph Probst, a 23-year-old father of three.
Google Alerts sent me a link to a new article on the White Rose this morning, and I figured I’d pass it along.
studentactivism.net 
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