Two Sad Items of Note in the News

As you are probably aware, one of the top jobs for the Republican administration is basically to get trans adults and students to stop existing. Go back into the closet or whereever. You can exist as long as you present as what we say you should be. 

That administration now wants to take federal grants away from a university if they allow a trans athlete to compete. That would be the University of Maine and it was probably chosen because Maine's governor stood up to that President at a governors meeting weeks ago. 

Now, the GOP in Arkansas wants to do this:

GOP proposes bill that would punish supporting trans youth through new names and haircuts 

From The Advocate:

H.B. 1668, the so-called "Vulnerable Youth Protection Act," would allow minors or their parents to sue anyone who even acknowledges a minor's gender identity, including "without limitation changes in clothing, pronouns, hairstyle, and name." Lawsuits are permitted up to 15 years after the alleged conduct, with damages of $10,000, or up to $10 million if they have received gender-affirming care.

Arkansas Republicans passed a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors in 2021, after which the the state saw an increase in teenage suicide attempts. The bill was deemed unconstitutional and struck down by a judge in 2023, and remains blocked today. However, the state passed a bill shortly after that similarly allowing people to sue providers for supposed "malpractice" up to 15 years after receiving gender-affirming care.

I would like to see the photos of what "a trans haircut" looks like. I would suspect it might be one that MANY teenagers of all stripes might like.

They want to force girls and boys into a '50s box of what girls and boys are "supposed" to be. 

 

 

 

The other story is Danny Westneat column in the Seattle Times today which comes as zero surprise to me. I think Danny and I have been beating this drum for decades now.  He pivots off testimony that I heard also at the last School Board meeting from Hamilton International School teacher David Evans.

 

Seattle Public Schools has decided to press pause on dismantling its dedicated advanced learning program, which is a bit of welcome news.

But the damage already done by this misguided crusade has been profound — and still isn’t being reckoned with by school or civic leaders.

Consider what happened in one Seattle middle school, Hamilton, in the years since David Evans began teaching math there.

As recently as 2016, he says, the school had six classes of middle schoolers taking geometry, which is technically a 10th grade course. There was one class taking Algebra II, an 11th grade course. This was heady stuff — that’s as many as 150 middle schoolers in just one Seattle school who were two to four years advanced in math.

“Now we have only one section of geometry,” Evans testified at a School Board meeting last week, while Algebra II isn’t offered at all.

“What we are doing in Seattle public schools is we’re disappearing our top students in math,” he said.

We should not be ashamed of the (advanced learning) program,” he concluded. “We should bring it back. We have to decide to get out of the way of the kids.”

Danny rightly points out that the state-funded study on why SPS is losing students is found that housing costs were NOT a primary reason.

Families “who disenrolled their students from SPS overwhelmingly cited concerns about the quality of education and the curriculum as top reasons,” found a study presented last month.

What’s more, “a majority of adults of current students have considered disenrolling their students over concerns about the quality of education” (emphasis added).

I'm going to have more to say about some bigger truths in SPS and the whole of Seattle that Westneat bluntly states. But that's for another day.

Meanwhile, what is going to be the SPS response to this HC issue AND, more importantly, will the Board rubberstamp it?