But their school principal does.

This week, Baltic High School, just north of here, became one of the latest across the USA to ban the rubber bracelet, which has a message some say is in poor taste: “I love boobies.”

The bracelets have caused controversy in schools in states including California, Colorado, Idaho, Florida and Wisconsin. Some districts allow students to wear them inside-out, and others ban them.

“When we had an assembly the first day of school, I basically told the students we are not insensitive to the cause,” Baltic High Principal Jim Aisenbrey says. “I think everybody in the gym, including myself, has had a family member or relative or friend who has dealt with the issue. I do think there are more proper ways to bring this plight to the attention of people, and I don’t think this is a proper way.”

“I guess I never thought of them as offensive,” Aberson says. Her grandmother and five of her grandmother’s sisters battled breast cancer.

The bracelets, which sell for about $4 in stores, were created by Keep A Breast Foundation, a Carlsbad, Calif., non-profit group that seeks to increase breast cancer awareness among young people.

Proceeds from sales support the foundation’s programs, founder Shaney Jo Darden says. She says the bracelets are meant to spark discussions.

“That’s the whole idea, it’s getting people to talk about breast cancer, it’s getting people to share their feelings about how this disease has impacted their life,” she says. “The bracelet is doing what it’s meant to do — it’s making people talk.”

“Schools banning it? That’s crazy,” says Julie Hubbell of Lewisville, Texas. Hubbell helped organize an auction and barbeque named “Boobie Q” to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

In the Fresno area, students in the Clovis Unified School District were told not to wear the bracelets in class — or to turn them inside out so the message is not visible, spokeswoman Kelly Avants says. The school district’s dress code outlaws jewelry with sexually suggestive language or images, she says.

Lilburn police on Wednesday said the four Meadowcreek High students were responsible for the attack last week on Miguel Mesa, a student at Lilburn Middle School.

One was arrested and taken to a youth detention center, while the other three were expected to be in custody Wednesday night, police said.

Charges were pending against the four. Three are juveniles and one is an adult, but the adult’s name was not released.

Tips from the community led police to the suspects who threw the balloon from a van, said Lilburn Police Capt. Bruce Hedley.

“We’ve recovered the bleach bottle and balloons used,” Hedley told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

And that’s where you can find more of this story including a picture of the poor kid.

But the girl’s parents say it’s a huge overreaction.

“I think it’s stupid to give a kid a week’s worth of detention for a piece of candy,” said Amber Brazda, the girl’s mother. “The whole thing was just ridiculous to me.”

Leighann Adair, 10, was eating lunch Monday when a teacher confiscated the candy. Her parents said she was in tears when she arrived home later that afternoon and handed them the detention notice.

According to the disciplinary referral, she would be separated from other students during lunch and recess through Friday.
Jack Ellis, the superintendent for Brazos Independent School District, declined an on-camera interview. But he said the school was abiding by a state guideline that banned “minimal nutrition” foods.

“Whether or not I agree with the guidelines, we have to follow the rules,” he said.

The state, however, gives each school discretion over how to enforce the policy. Ellis said school officials had decided a stricter punishment was necessary after lesser penalties failed to serve as a deterrent.

Ellis said failing to adhere to the state’s guidelines could put federal funding in jeopardy.

According to the Texas Department of Agriculture’s website, “The Texas Public School Nutrition Policy (TPSNP) explicitly states that it does not restrict what foods or beverages parents may provide for their own children’s consumption.”

Brazos Elementary Principal Jeanne Young, said the problem, in this instance, was that the candy was provided by another student – not the girl’s parents.

The girl’s mother said the incident has taught her daughter a lesson, but not the one her teachers intended.

“I told her, ‘Leighann, unfortunately you’re learning very young that life’s not fair,’” Brazda said.

The 10th-grade boy at Forest Park High School sent the naked image of himself with his phone to a 16-year-old girl at his Clayton County school and it was forwarded to four other students, one of them 14.

The girl and boy were punished the same day last month in metro Atlanta school systems about 40 miles apart. Their consequences were quite different.

(more)

Maybe one day in the future we’ll figure out that our naked bodies aren’t inherently evil. And maybe one day legislatures will create laws that make functional and practical sense. And maybe one day monkeys will fly out of my butt. If so, I’ll make sure to take a pic of it and send it to you okay?

A school district police report said the 12-year-old boy was held by several students, touched inappropriately, then stuffed in a locker.

It happened March 10 at Stephenson Middle School in Stone Mountain.

The 12-year-old victim said he went into the locker room to change clothes after track practice, and that’s when the group of six boys approached him, the report said.

Channel 2 Action News investigative reporter Jodie Fleischer spoke to parents about the incident. “This is something I had to talk to my son about because, he saw, and I’m trying to explain to him that’s something not supposed to happen at school and you’re not supposed to see this,” said Troy Ray.

Two 14-year-olds are facing sexual battery charges, three more students are facing reckless conduct charges and the sixth boy is not criminally charged, the report said. All students detained are facing school discipline.

“This was an incident, a situation that is intolerable, that’s not accepted by DeKalb County School system and we’re addressing it,” said district spokesman Dale Davis.

Davis also said this was an isolated incident and that the school environment in DeKalb is safe.

“I’m gay. Can I go to the prom?”

He can, and will. But those eight little words have done more than ensure the high school senior can take a same-sex date to Bleckley High School’s prom next month.

Seeking that answer has thrust him to the forefront of a national discussion. It’s touched off heated discussions in beauty salons and restaurants here and elsewhere, and made this small middle Georgia town a focal point in the debate over gay rights. Some applaud him for bravery. Others say his soul’s in peril.

All he really wanted, he says, was a night to remember.

“I didn’t anticipate this,” Derrick said earlier this week, a few days after news got out that he would bring his boyfriend, a young man from Tift County, to his prom. “I thought this might run on the second page of the paper.”

Instead, he’s Derrick Martin, sudden celebrity. As he sat on a bench underneath a bare oak tree outside a Bleckley school building, a Ford pickup, kids hanging out of its cab, zipped by. Derrick! Derrick! young voices belled.

A Honda sped past. It sprouted arms from every window. Hey, Derrick!

Derrick sighed. “If I could have just brought him without asking, I would have done that.”

‘You better sit down’

Derrick Martin is young enough that his facial hair is still spotty; like the rest of him, it’s not done growing. His 160 pounds are stretched across a frame nudging 6-foot-3. He is as long and narrow as a church pew, and only slightly more comfortable discussing all that’s happened since his Google query.

As he searched Web sites, Derrick came across the legal defense site for the national gay-rights organization Lambda. A representative of the group told him that if a school system didn’t have rules forbidding same-sex dates, then Derrick likely could bring his boyfriend.

“They did warn me that the school system could cancel the prom,” he said.

That wasn’t just conjecture. School officials in Itawamba County, Miss., canceled a prom recently after 18-year-old Constance McMillen said she wanted to bring a girl to her school’s April 2 dance. The American Civil Liberties Union, claiming the school board violated her right to free expression, has demanded that McMillen be allowed to attend.

Nothing like that occurred in January, when Derrick requested a meeting with Bleckley High Principal Michelle Masters. Because his date isn’t a Bleckley student, school rules required Derrick to fill out a form identifying him. He decided to check with Masters first.

“You better sit down,” he began.

Masters took the request to the Bleckley County Board of Education. When the board next met, it also discussed another Martin — Derrick’s father, Ray, a math teacher at the high school. Board members named him Bleckley’s teacher of the year.

Then they turned to his son. In early March, the board announced that Derrick could bring his boyfriend to the prom. School Superintendent Charlotte Pipkin, who declined comment, earlier this week released a two-paragraph statement.

The board decision, the statement said in part, “is not an endorsement of any particular practice or life style, but rather recognition of the legal environment in which public schools operate today.”

Bleckley High School, home of the Royals, would hold its prom April 17, as originally planned. The junior class would plan it, as well as decorate the school gym. This is a BHS tradition.

But tradition, people soon learned, was about to get a test.

A town debates

Cochran, about two hours south of Atlanta, is a confluence of U.S. and state roads that come together for a few blocks before fanning out again across rolling land that yields peanuts and cotton. A museum near the police department is dedicated to those agricultural staples.

About 5,200 people live here. Wednesdays at noon, much of downtown adheres to a practice that has just about gone the way of the mule. Stores close. People head to the municipal golf course, visit Macon to shop, or catch up on the latest events.

A lot of catching up these days focuses on Derrick’s decision, and how it reflects change — not just in Cochran, either.

Barbara Anderson’s shears snipped quickly, as if they were as indignant as she.

“I think they [the school board] ought to do like that other state and cancel the prom,” said Anderson, who owns a styling salon here. “They won’t allow us to have God in school, but they’ll allow this?”

Across the street, waitress Victoria Cagle took a break after the lunch rush. She is a 2009 Bleckley grad who hopes to attend nearby Middle Georgia College and teach high school biology.

“I think what they [the board] did was the right thing,” said Cagle, 19. “I think what he’s doing is awesome.”

Merchant Jason Ledbetter isn’t so sure.

“It bothers me,” said Ledbetter, 47, part-owner of a downtown music store. “By him doing that, it shows we accept it.”

Business partner Kenny Laney wasn’t as ruffled as Ledbetter. “It’s like an inter-racial couple,” said Laney, 54. “I thought we would have gotten over that by now, and gotten over this, too.”

The boys may face a divine reckoning, said resident Faye Ortiz. “What they do is up to them,” said Ortiz, 45, who recently moved back to central Georgia from Texas. “They’ve got to answer to God.”

Dealing with fallout

Opinions aside, Derrick’s action has come at a cost. He’s no longer living at home. Staying there, he said, became intolerable as news spread that he was taking his boyfriend to the prom. For now he’s staying with a friend, the girl he escorted to last year’s prom.

“She’s my best friend,” he said.

He also has friends who are gay, Derrick said. He expected some of them to stand with him when he took his request to school officials.

“I thought I would have had a little bit of backup,” he said, disappointment creeping in his voice. “But it’s just me.”

His boyfriend, who’s also 18 and a school senior, has not made any public comments. Derrick’s parents are remaining silent, too.

So Derrick talks. He talks about school. Kids there have known he is gay for a while. Most of them, he thinks, are on his side.

He talks about work. He is an after-school tutor for elementary and middle school kids at risk of not passing state tests.

He talks about the future. He’s planning to attend Georgia Southern University, which he said has given him a scholarship in recognition of his 92.5 average. He wants to go to law school, maybe someday become the state or U.S. attorney general. “That would just be so awesome.”

He also thinks about what has happened these past few months.

“I only wanted to be honest,” he said. Now, he feels an obligation. If he has to be the face of gay rights, OK.

A big lesson to learn from eight little words.

Prom in Mississippi school called off when it was found out a lesbian was going to bring her girlfriend.

Virginia politicians first undo then kind of half-assedly redo protections against gay discrimination.

Florida legislators are pondering using tax breaks as a way to mold family-values, making sure to try and exclude gay stuff.

And of course, homophobia abounds in the fall out over the Eric Massa shit.

That’s just a couple days worth of news that I uncovered during my regular looking over things on the interbutts. I didn’t even include things that are happening in other parts of the world.

So what’s the deal? Is it because we got pussy-acting Democrats in control over both houses of Congress and the Presidency that now the other side is all revved up and ready to trample over basic human rights? Because, let me tell you something, if the Bush Years made everyone so goth damned depressed… I have to suggest that maybe we homos should feel even more goth damned depressed now.

Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the “sexually graphic” entry is “just not age appropriate”, according to the area’s local paper.

The dictionary’s online definition of the term is “oral stimulation of the genitals”. “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

While some parents have praised the move – “[it's] a prestigious dictionary that’s used in the Riverside County spelling bee, but I also imagine there are words in there of concern,” said Randy Freeman – others have raised concerns. “It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground,” father Jason Rogers told local press. “You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?”

A panel is now reviewing whether the Menifee ban will be made permanent. The Merriam Webster dictionary joins an illustrious set of books that have been banned or challenged in the US, including Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which last year was suspended from and then reinstated to the curriculum at a Michigan school after complaints from parents about its coverage of graphic sex and violence, and titles by Khaled Hosseini and Philip Pullman, included in the American Library Association’s list of books that inspired most complaints last year.

The day after he was forced to kill his pet, the child told his teacher, Meriwether County Sheriff Steve Whitlock told the AJC Thursday evening.

The teacher reported the incident to DFCS authorities, who contacted police, Whitlock said. The pet’s death allegedly took place at the family’s Warm Springs home.

On Friday, 38-year-old Lynn Middlebrooks Geter was arrested, Whitlock said. Geter faces one charge each of animal cruelty, child cruelty and battery.

Geter remained in the Meriwether County jail Thursday evening, Whitlock said.

Delaware County Sheriff George Sheridan says the boy was riding the bus to Selma Elementary School when he handed out the money on Friday, the last school day before Christmas vacation began.

Children who received the ones, fives and twenties told teachers and the principal, and the sheriff’s department was called.

Officers found the boy carrying the rest of the cash, which was returned to his grandparents. Police weren’t certain what he intended to do with the money or how he got it from the safe.

Cobb County Superior Court Judge Robert Flournoy ruled Dec. 9 that former Marietta High School teacher Christopher King was not guilty of sexual assault charges stemming from a relationship with a 17-year-old female student.

The judge’s decision echoed a Georgia Supreme Court ruling in June that stated it is not illegal for a teacher and a student who is 16 or older to have sex. The age of consent in Georgia is 16.

Cobb County District Attorney Pat Head said he disagrees with Flournoy’s ruling. He plans to move forward with the case against Steven Martin Parkman, a former teacher at Harrison High School in west Cobb.

Parkman, 34, is accused of having consensual sex with a 17-year-old female student.

“The judge and I differ on our opinion about whether expert testimony regarding consent is a factual issue for the jury or not,” Head said in an e-mail. “Obviously, I think it is and he does not.”

Head said he will ask a grand jury to reindict Parkman within the next few weeks and add a charge of sodomy against the former orchestra teacher. Parkman resigned in lieu of termination before his arrest April 14, 2008.

Parkman’s lawyer, Noah Pines, said the continued prosecution of his client is “ridiculous.”

Letters, texts and Facebook posts indicate that the alleged victim willingly had sex with Parkman, Pines said.

Pines said he will file a motion to dismiss the sodomy charge on the grounds that it is unconstitutional if his client is reindicted. The state law prohibiting sodomy, which is defined as either oral or anal sex, is seldom enforced when it involves consenting adults.

Sodomy is a felony punishable by one to 20 years in prison and a lifetime on the sex offender registry. The punishment is much harsher for a couple caught engaging in oral sex than it is for a couple caught having intercourse in public. Public indecency is a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of 12 months in prison and a $1,000 fine.

Parkman told investigators that he had sex with the student in the orchestra room at school and in his car. The student has since graduated from high school and entered college, Pines said.

“If they present the case on sodomy, they are selectively prosecuting my client,” Pines said. “The law applies to anyone who gives or receives [oral sex]. She is just as guilty as my client.”

The War On Kids: Official Site
Interview with Stephen Colbert

Schools have become prisons. In fact, they are designed by the same architects.
Natural child-like behavior has become criminalized.
Zero Tolerance has replaced common sense.
There is a war on kids, and now there is a documentary about just that.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore said Monday that two 12-year-olds were arrested for suspicion of misdemeanor battery, and a 13-year-old was booked for misdemeanor cyberbullying. They were released to their parents.

A total of eight boys are suspected in the Nov. 20 attacks on seven students at A.E. Wright Middle School in Calabasas.

Authorities believe the shoves and kicks were prompted by a message referring to a “South Park” episode satirizing racial prejudice.

Nobody was seriously hurt.

(Ed note: lol, cyberbullying is a crime now? Oh shit. Guess I should take back all those mean things I said about others in all of those archive posts.)