School Walkout On March 14

In response to loosely translated and barely enforced laws in America concerning the ownership and uses of firearms, students in American public schools are planning a seventeen minute walkout on March 14, to recognize the loss of seventeen students in Parkland, Florida to a mass shooting at a school and to protest the current interpretation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution. Well and good; the First Amendment applies to students in public schools, along with everyone else in this country.

Schools have responded to this idea differently. Some schools have allowed it, some schools have discouraged it, and other schools are threatening to impose unconstitutional sanctions to students who exercise their First Amendment rights and walk out for seventeen minutes. A lot of schools are making threats of inappropriate sanctions, seemingly without contacting the attorneys that represent their school boards. Beyond counted the seventeen minutes of missed class time as an unexcused absence for each student who walks out, a school really does not the legal authority to back up their claims of having children arrested for walking down hallways and through doors. Further information can be accessed here, though a list of protocols published by CNN.

Something public schools should recognize, prior to criticizing children for demanding change is that because of our leaders, Trump in particular, advocating the notion teachers should carry loaded weapons to class, children feel even less safe in school than they did before the last mass shooting at a school. In Kansas, schools actually began the 2013-2014 school year without insurance  because of lax gun laws in Kansas. 

Federal Law Applies To Kansas, Too

It's really about time. It has been found that the Constitution grants marriage licenses to all couples, regardless of sexual preference, and that the fourteenth amendment offers legitimacy to the marriages of gay men and women. But Kansas Governor Sam Brownback has a problem with America's Constitution. He refers to the Supreme Court as an "activist court", and promises to "review the ruling carefully to understand it's effects on the people of Kansas." Is he serious? When was this governor ever concerned about the effects of anything on the people of Kansas? From fighting Obamacare tooth and nail to stripping public schools of funds, Brownback has not shown much concern at all about the people of Kansas. But now Kansas will be required to recognize marriage, everyone's marriage. And about de-funding public schools; block grants do not work as well in funding numerous, tiny, redundant schools as they do in funding larger, more efficient, better staffed schools. In order for the type of funding for which the Kansas GOP has opted for the public schools in Kansas, the schools will have to be consolidated, county by county, and answerable to the state, rather then to hundreds of "unified school districts". This would actually be a very good idea for Kansas, but the legislature has put the cart before the horse......the small, community schools should have been shut down and reorganized first, into bigger schools. Then, block grants, rather than the yearly handouts based on the number of students each school contains, would have been more sensible. The Supreme Court in Kansas made a decision for Brownback, though: de-funding education this way is unconstitutional. Brownback has vowed to appeal this decision. It seems he cannot get around the Constitution today!

If Kansas Republicans were truly conservative, the Kansas Department of Education and all of the "unified school districts", along with their schools, would have been in receivership a long time ago. Instead of small schools, serving less than one hundred students from kindergarten to twelfth grade in some cases, schools would be consolidated. Rather than forcing tax payers to fund the lifestyles of three or four high school principals in a county that only has three or four hundred high school students, there would only be one high school principal to pay. We could completely eliminate nonsense positions, such as "curriculum adviser", because the curriculum would be dictated by the state and by national and global standards. Allowing small towns in Kansas to waste money on tiny, inefficient schools is a frivolous waste, and no conservative worth his salt would allow such a thing to continue under his watch.

In other news, a legislative panel has dismissed a charge against Congresswoman Valdenia Winn, D; Wichita, Kansas. It seems that some Kansas Republicans did not like it when she referred to them as "racist bigots" when they tried to deny in-state tuition to immigrants. The Constitution strikes again! This time, with the First Amendment! It appears that the Constitution is sending a message to Kansas bigots today.