Parents to get truancy reminders

ttp://www.stuff.co.nz/nelsonmail/4666609a6007.html

Parents to get truancy reminders

By MARCUS STICKLEY – Nelson | Monday, 25 August 2008

Parents could soon start being prosecuted for taking their children out of school for a holiday, a Nelson principal says.

Primary schools have been reinforcing attendance rules with parents after receiving reminders from the Education Ministry to do so.

Under the Education Act, every pupil enrolled at a registered school must attend the school whenever it is open. Ministry guidelines say it is up to principals to decide whether an absence is justified.

Parents can be prosecuted for not sending their children to school, and fines of $15 a day – up to $150 for a first offence – can be imposed if they are convicted.

Hampden St School principal Don McLean said that for a school to prosecute a parent for taking their child away on holiday would be a “bold thing to do, but maybe it’s not too far away”.

In his school newsletter in May, he told parents that the ministry was taking a “tougher line on attendance and have clearly defined what a justifiable absence is and what truancy is”.

“Some of you may be surprised to hear that if you take your child on an overseas trip in school time, this is considered an unjustified absence and therefore your children are recorded as truant.”

Similarly, a week-long ski trip during school time would also be unjustified, he said in the newsletter.

Mr McLean told the Nelson Mail the school kept a record of pupils who missed school due to family holidays, and he planned to “take parents aside” to discuss the issue if they did it regularly.

“We have to get tough on them.”

However, he said the rules were “one size fits all”, which he did not agree with.

If a pupil was travelling to a destination such as Europe, the cultural education they would get could be more valuable than what they would learn in the classroom in that time, he said.

Mr McLean said four children were currently away overseas, mostly for family reasons.

“There seems to be a lot at the moment.”

Hampden St School parent Andrew Meffan has taken his two children on week-long skiing holidays to Wanaka during the school term in previous years.

He said he planned to do the same next week, staying with members of his extended family in a house that was available to them only at certain times during the year.

“But we don’t want to be on the wrong side of the rules and have a truancy officer knock on our door.”

Mr Meffan said truancy rules needed to be targeted appropriately.

“There needs to be more of an evaluation of cases based on the student and family, and commitment to learning.”

St Paul’s Catholic Primary School principal John Dorman said he had received a letter from the ministry before the start of the school year, saying schools should not condone parents taking their children out of school for holidays.

Craig wrote this letter to the editor:

25 August 2008

Letter to Editor

Nelson Mail

Nelson

The idea of schools threatening parents with truancy notices for taking their children on holiday demonstrates one of the more obvious characteristics of state schooling institutions: that they are simply prisons or child warehouses, designed to baby-sit kids and keep them off the streets.

A holiday with the family, the MoE apparently informs the schools, is not a “justified” absence from school. So the MoE equates a geographical/cultural/social field trip with a child’s parents and siblings to hanging around the mall or sitting at home watching videos all day. The MoE demonstrates again its disconnection from the real world. Any formal notification by the parents that they are taking the child out of the schooling institution should be justification enough: the parents’ authority should trump that of the MoE any day.

Regards,

Report veils junior school violence

From the Family First NZ Weekly newsletter:

Report veils junior school violence
The Press 06 August 2008
A Ministry of Education report trumpeting a fall in school suspensions has overlooked a 37 per cent surge in primary school disciplinary actions. …the number of primary school children stood down and suspended has grown from 4800 in 2000 to 6595 last year. In 2007, 945 primary school students were suspended and 5650 stood down …Educators say those numbers reflect an ongoing trend for increasingly violent misbehaviour by children as young as five.

Minister of Education Chris Carter released the ministry report heralding a “concerted effort by schools supported by the ministry”. Family First national director Bob McCoskrie, who pursued the ministry over the data, said he could not believe the report did not even touch on a nationwide problem. “We need to be asking ourselves some pretty tough questions about why almost 1000 kids are being chucked out of primary schools for behaviour that is just so bad that schools have got to the point where they won’t even work with it,” McCoskrie said. READ MORE
Also: Troubled pupils kept on at school – to make government look good! READ MORE

USA – Phyllis Schlafly: The NEA spells out its policies

Things to watch out for in New Zealand:

 

http://eurekareporter.com/article/080727-the-nea-spells-out-its-policies

The NEA spells out its policies

By Phyllis Schlafly

Published: Jul 27 2008, 11:20 PM

The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, attracted 9,000 delegates to its annual convention in Washington, D.C., over the Fourth of July weekend. Delegates sported buttons with provocative slogans such as “Gay marriage causes Global Warming only because we are so hot!,” “Hate is not a family value,” “The ‘Christian Right’ is neither” and “Gay Rights are civil rights.”

The delegates passed dozens of hard-hitting resolutions that now become the NEA’s official policy. The resolutions authorize NEA members and employees to lobby for those goals in the halls of Congress and state capitols.

NEA resolutions cover the waterfront of all sorts of political issues that have nothing to do with improving education for schoolchildren, such as supporting statehood for the District of Columbia, a “single-payer health care plan” (i.e., government-run), gun control, ratification of the International Criminal Court Treaty, and taking steps “to change activities that contribute to global climate change.”

The NEA fiercely opposes any competition for public schools, such as vouchers, tuition tax credits, parental option plans or public support of any kind to non-public schools. The NEA strongly opposes designating English as our official language even though such a designation is supported by more than 80 percent of Americans.

The NEA opposes homeschooling unless children are taught by state-licensed teachers using a state-approved curriculum. The NEA wants to bar homeschooled students from participating in any extracurricular activities in public schools even though their parents pay school taxes.

The NEA wants many additional job-creating services and programs to be provided by public schools, such as early childhood education (i.e., baby-sitting for preschoolers). NEA resolutions call for “programs in the public schools for children from birth through age 8” and for “mandatory kindergarten with compulsory attendance.”

NEA resolutions include all the major feminist goals such as “the right to reproductive freedom” (i.e., abortion on demand); “comparable worth” (i.e., government control of wages according to feminist ideology rather than the free market); full funding for the feminist boondoggle called the Women’s Educational Equity Act; and “the use of nonsexist language,” i.e., censoring out all masculine words such as husband and father.

The NEA even urges its affiliates to work for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was declared dead by the U.S. Supreme Court 26 years ago.

The influence of the gay lobby is pervasive in dozens of NEA resolutions adopted by 2008 convention delegates. Diversity is the code word used for pro-gay indoctrination in the classroom.

The NEA’s diversity resolution makes clear that this means teaching about “sexual orientation” and “gender identification,” words that are repeated in dozens of resolutions. The NEA demands that “diversity-based curricula” even be imposed on preschoolers.

NEA convention delegates were invited to an open hearing by the SOGI Committee in Room 149A on July 1. In case you don’t know, SOGI stands for Sexual Orientation Gender Identification.

The NEA urges its members to offer “diverse role models” via the “hiring and promotion of diverse education employees in our public schools.” The NEA puts “domestic partnerships, civil unions and marriage” on an equal footing.

The NEA wants every child, regardless of age, to have “direct and confidential access, without notification to parents, to comprehensive health education. That would include things such as learning how to use condoms for premarital sex, as well as social and psychological programs and services.”

The NEA wants public schools to take over the physical and mental care of students through school clinics that provide services, diagnosis, treatment, family-planning counseling, and access to birth control methods “with instruction in their use.” Family planning clinics are called on to “provide intensive counseling.”

The NEA wants all sex-education courses, textbooks, curricula, instructional materials and activities to include indoctrination about sexual orientation and gender identification, plus warnings about homophobia.

The NEA is very generous with taxpayer money spent on illegal immigrants. The NEA not only favors amnesty for illegal-immigrant students, but also in-state college tuition and financial aid to illegal-immigrant college students.

The NEA is strong for “multicultural education,” which the resolution makes clear does not mean studying facts about different countries and cultures. It means “the process of incorporating the values” and influencing “behavior” toward the NEA’s version of “the common good,” such as “reducing homophobia.”

Of course, the NEA supports “global education” to teach “interdependency in sharing the world’s resources.” It’s also no surprise that the NEA adamantly opposes any requirement that schools “schedule a moment of silence.”

Will parents be silent about the radical goals of their children’s teachers?

Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, political analyst and the author of the newly revised and expanded “Supremacists.” Her e-mail address is phyllis@eagleforum.org.

Home schoolers swap teaching tips

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4633178a7694.html

Home schoolers swap teaching tips

By JOHN HARTEVELT – The Press | Monday, 28 July 2008

Parents who home school their students compared notes on a surge in their number at a gathering in Christchurch at the weekend.

Home schoolers from Christchurch and around the country met in Bishopdale for a curriculum fair and a series of workshops.

National director of the Home Education Foundation Craig Smith said about 50 people attended and visited seminars which covered topics ranging from classical education to how home education could prevent burnout.

Home schooling appealed to many parents because of the “administrative bullying” of teachers and the public education system in general.

“I hear a lot parents tell me my child’s been at school now for three years and they haven’t learned a darn thing,” Smith said.

The number of children home schooled has grown from about 5280 10 years ago to 6500 in July last year.

Home-schooled children must obtain a certificate of exemption from regular schooling.

The Ministry of Education said home-based schooling must meet the same standards as registered schools.

Kathy Duncan said her four children, aged between five and 12, mixed with a lot of other children who were home schooled.

“Certainly our children wouldn’t socialise with 30 other children the same age as them every day but they do have friends they see regularly,” Duncan said.

Home schooling was a a lifestyle choice, she said.

“It’s not just like having school at home … all of life becomes an education. It’s really hard to separate our life from the education.”

Duncan does not have any teaching qualifications but she said she had “a lot of experience”.

Home schooling is most popular on the West Coast, where 1.9 per cent of children are in home schooling.

The Canterbury Home Educators group has 230 members, representing less than 1% of students in the region.

Smith said aspects of the national assessment programme (NCEA) were “anti-intellectual” and the school curriculum needed to get back to basics and cut out political correctness.

Smith did not want any more Government funding because he feared it would take control of home schoolers.

“The ERO (Education Review Office) is sitting in judgment on the way you as a parent relate to your own child,” he said.