Facts: Mr. and Mrs. Edward Schempp, Unitarian in religion, brought a complaint against the Abington School District in Pennsylvania because their children were required to listen to ten Bible verses read each morning, followed by a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Teachers were required to participate in the exercise under threat of losing their jobs, while students were required to stand at attention for the reading. No comments were made following the verses. The Schempps held that the Pennsylvania law was unconstitutional, as they believed the statute violated the 1st Amendment Establishment clause stating, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled just one year earlier in Engel v. Vitale (1962), that even non-sectarian generic prayers were unlawful and in violation of the Establishment Cause of the 1st Amendment. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the Schempp case combined with the Murray v. Curlett case together as a once and for all means of settling the issue of Bible reading and prayer in public schools.
Case Study: Counts vs. Cedarville School District Situation The Counts v. Cedarville School District court case was about the Harry Potter book series. After receiving a complaint from a parent, the Cedarville School Board voted 3-2 to remove all of the books from the Harry Potter series from the open shelves of public school libraries. Students who wished to read or check out these books could do so only with written parental permission. Several students and their parents filed suit, seeking the return of the books to the open shelves. In the course of discovery, the School Board members who voted to remove the books acknowledged that they had not read many of the books and that they removed them because they exposed students to the "religion of witchcraft."
Jennifer Roach American Systems 11/1/11 Abington School District v. Schempp Abington School District v. Schempp was a court case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. It originated in February 27-28 1963, when Edward Schemmp, a resident of Abington Township, Pennsylvania sued the Abington School District for allowing the enforcement of the Pennsylvania law that it was involuntary to have his children listen and even read parts of the bible alongside their public education. This law stated that "[a]t least ten verses from the Holy Bible [be] read, without comment, at the opening of each public school on each school day." Schemmp argues that this law violates his rights along with his children’s rights according to the first and fourteenth amendments. Only four other states made a 25 minute class every morning reading at least ten verses of the Bible.
Reasons given to these suspensions was that the school system did not allow for students to wear armbands in school. The parents filed a case against the Des Moines school system stating that they had violated the teenagers rights to peaceful protest and to freedom of speech. Tinker vs Des Moines reached the Supreme Court where they ruled in favor of Tinker saying that forcing them to stop a peaceful protest, that did not interrupt learning at the schools, by attempting to remove the armbands did infringe on the kids first and fourteenth amendment rights. Tinker V Des Moines outcome set precedent for future cases involving public school systems and First amendment rights, such as the Easton Area School District appeal to the US Supreme Court to uphold their ban on the "I Love Boobies" bracelets that many students in there schools were wearing. The board voted seven to one against the schools appeal stating that the students were wearing the bracelets for charity and that to ask them to remove them would violate
ISP PART C: CONTEXTUAL CRITICISM When writing the book Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult takes into consideration her children’s personal experiences of being bullied at school as well as the history of school shootings. On March 6, 2007 Nineteen Minutes was published; on that very day Peter went to school and took the lives of nine students and one teacher. The story takes place in Sterling, a small town in New Hampshire; it was a town where “everyone knew everyone else” (21). As a mother of three, Picoult has seen her own children struggle to fit in and be what society wants them to be. “It was listening to their experiences, and my own frustrations, that led me to consider the topic.” Picoult also incorporates events that have taken place in the past into Nineteen Minutes, including the way the police told the parents of the deceased how their children had died.
Patrick Winters 3/20/15 Research Paper Proposal “I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.” John W. Gardner. Since the early 1980’s the United States Department of Education has pushed a mandate that required states to raise the standardized test scores of students in public schools. This headlong rush to improve the “numbers”, that so-called experts have determined is the only true measure of student success or failure, has had the effect of substantially watering down, or “dumbing down” the curriculum being taught in American public schools. So what factors are influencing this decades long trend that has educators teaching a curriculum that is often described as, “a mile wide, and a foot deep”, and will this lowering of standards in order to produce desired statistical outcomes result in American public schools producing students who are significantly less intelligent, both cognitively and content wise, than both American students of past generations and their peers from around the globe? The paper will examine this question from three different perspectives.
The next month, Nine students at Central Washington University were hospitalized after mixing excessive amounts of Four Loko with other alcohols. By November even more colleges were banning the popular drink after blame was put on Four Loko for a number of fatal incidents. After a wave of alcohol poisonings tied to Four Loko consumption, the F.D.A. demanded the immediate withdrawal of all alcoholic energy drinks In a study published in
The incident happened on the evening of September 13, and at the end of the month, Baxter returned to school at his parents urging. Was this fair? Was it fair that Baxter was able to attend school events, sports games and the likes while others were in graves because of his actions? In the end, he was charged with twenty counts of vehicular manslaughter, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and two counts of driving under the influence of alcohol. The punishment?
Des Moines Independent School District (1965) Issue: You Have the Right to Express Yourself Up to A Certain Point Three teens wore black armbands to a school in Des Moines, Iowa, to protest the war in Vietnam. School officials told them to remove the armbands, and when they refused they were suspended, and the parents sued the district, claiming it was in violation of their first amendment right of freedom of speech. When the Supreme Court got the case and looked it over they sided with the students they said “students and teachers don’t shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate”. The court did not grant students to an unlimited right ti self
And while she said she's "counting the days until graduation," she doesn't plan to leave high school without fighting back. She and her mother are preparing a lawsuit against her bullies and their parents. "I think parents can do their part by raising children who understand that there are all different kinds of people and it is in no way acceptable to bully any kind of person for any reason," the resilient student told CBS2. According to figures from the National Center of Education Statistics, almost one-third of students report being bullied in school. A new study from the Justice Policy Center's Urban Institute found that 17 percent of youths had been cyberbullied in the past year.