Imagine walking your child to school and suddenly an officer tells you that you’re trespassing and need to get off the premises. That’s the policy that Bear Branch Elementary School is implementing against parents. The tactic, according the original report by FOX 26, is to prevent parents who live close to the school from walking onto school grounds.
Thankfully, some parents with means are already choosing to remove their children due to the policy, but the principal has decided that he’s not going to back down. Apparently, no matter how close a child is to the school, the child either has to take a bus or wait in a long car pickup/drop off line. If you attempt to even walk your child off the campus, you could face criminal charges.
“She’s threatening to arrest people,” says Wendy Jarman about principal, Holly Ray.
Jarman pulled her children out of the school Monday and placed them in private school. She lives in the neighborhood behind the school. Her kids were walkers who she escorted, but they can’t do that anymore.
Ray won’t allow it. Ray has gotten Montgomery County Constables to be her enforcers.
“This has happened to many parents,” Jarman says. “They have been cited. They have been threatened, if they step one foot on school property, they will be arrested and charged with who knows what.”
Frank Young has one of those warnings. He also lives close to the school and he also pulled his children out of it. Young says no effort to negotiate a better policy or even hundreds of signatures on a petition got the district to change the policy or bully tactics.
“Mrs. Ray’s policy is implying that a parent doesn’t have the ability or capability to decide what is safest for her children and that the school district does,” Young says. “I disagree.”
The school district responded to our request for comment with a statement fully supporting Principal Ray, saying the goal is a safe dismissal process.
But parents who have been coming to the school for years say there was nothing unsafe about the old pickup and drop off procedures. They say this is simply a principal overstepping her boundaries.
Young says some parents are just going along with the principal to keep peace, but he says not speaking up allows a poisonous environment to fester.
“The most toxic thing we can do for our kids is not fight for truth and justice,” Young says.”
Any rational person would state that Young is correct, but I don’t think she’s going far enough. One of the saddest aspects of American society is how little time parents are able to spend with their children. A typical working parent spends just 19 minutes a day looking after their children. Walking a child to school may be the only time spent with their child outside the confines of stressful car rides, or away from their phones and computers. Seeing as three-quarters of children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates, regulations like these make the parent child relationship even worse.
Many of these issues would go away if not for the true problem in this situation, which is public education. If you’re out to fight for truth and justice, how about admitting that public school is more about indoctrination than about education? As Peter Gray, author of numerous books on childhood education, put it:
“Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it is. It’s not polite. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential. . . . A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age.”
“Schooling that children are forced to endure—in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the “learning” is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests—turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children’s natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels.”
Even if you still believe that public educations is of merit, the actions done by this school are hard to justify. In part because it’s now safer than it’s been in 40 years for a child to be outside.
The FBI has several decades of data on missing persons now, and those numbers show that the number of missing person reports involving minors has been at record low levels in recent years. Overall, the number of these reports have fallen by 40 percent since 1997. This is more impressive when you consider that the overall U.S. population has risen by 30 percent over that same time period, meaning that the actual rate of missing person reports for children has fallen faster than 40 percent.
Data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that between 1993 and 2013, the number of child pedestrians struck and killed by cars fell by more than two-thirds, from more than 800 deaths to fewer than 250. The number of traffic-related pedestrian injuries in this age group fell by a similar percentage over the same period. Again these are raw numbers, and as the population has grown over that period, the actual rate has fallen even faster.
If we’re going to get away from the absurdity which has taken hold of America due to “stranger danger” then let’s admit that the government isn’t trying to “protect you.” The government is about controlling people, plain and simple. As that wonderful parent put it, “the most toxic thing we can do for our kids is not fight for truth and justice,” and we’ll never have justice until we admit the truth – the government is your enemy.
War is when your government tells you who the enemy is. A revolution is when you figure it out yourself.
If you’re thinking of getting your child out of public school, or simply need a little help with your homeschooling/unschooling curriculum, consider checking out the Ron Paul Homeschool Curriculum.
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Carlos Morales is a former Child Protective Services investigator, president and founder of Child Protective Services Victim Support, the host of the Libertarian Atheist Podcast, and a committed legal advocate for family reunification.
Since leaving his career as an investigator, he has actively helped families throughout the country fight for their children in and out of court. His pursuit of a radical overhaul for child protection programs has taken him from university lecture halls, to television and radio studios, and the pages of a variety of publications. This has culminated into the publication of his new book, Legally Kidnapped: The Case Against Child Protective Services (http://www.legallykidnapped.net/)
Hi everyone! Do not allow it for one twisted mind ruin your happiness. Cast the principal out. She acting like communist in North Korea or she is their member?? and want succumb you all. Free your country from such people, sent them there where their command apply they will be only happy live in their desired environment. BEWARE SUCH PEOPLE THAT ARE DICTATORIAN ! Enjoy your freedom in America that fading so rapidly away from you with people like these ONE. Who giving her the authority over you and your children? Why she is still there and making rest of people in authority laughing stock, she is not worth to be look at not to listen too!!
“If you attempt to even walk your child off the campus, you could face criminal charges.”
Try it. I DARE YOU. and I will sue the school for wrongful charges.
If my child is on that property I HAVE THE RIGHT to enter said property any means I want.
If you try to stop me, I will be glad to get my truck and drive it THROUGH your front doors.
The U.S. public school system is a joke.
Doing a little investigation on the school website, my read of the situation is that there are a handful of parents who were not willing to honor the newly introduced policy that walkers were required to wait to be released twenty minutes later than riders—after the buses and the car line were diminished and foot traffic could happen without causing a safety concern. It seems that the school has had to negotiate parents who became vitriolic with staff members when they, as individuals, were not able to bend that policy and pick their individual child up at the release time of the riders. And then that group of entitled parents got a news agency to enflame their concerns because “Parents banned from walking students to school” is a better headline than “Entitled Parent tries to subvert policy designed to provide for a smooth and safe transition out of the building for ALL students and gets their fanny schooled by a security officer”
Let me guess. Its in the SOUTH.
Its got to be the heat rotting their brains. I cant think of another explanation other than inbreeding.
If you take your kids out of school, you are fully capable and qualified to help them design their own curriculum; you don’t need someone else to do it for you.
it you will not fight for your own child, you are not of much value. A dog will fight for her puppies.
Just two things:
Firstly, I find it worrying that they don’t want parents on the campus. I have a 7 year old grandson and one of his parents walk him to school and collect him from school every day. The school encourages students to walk or cycle to school and they encourage the parents to be part of that process. And at his age they will not let him out of the school unless there is a named appropriate adult there to meet him.
Secondly, according to the CDC childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years. The percentage of children aged 6–11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 18% in 2012. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12–19 years who were obese increased from 5% to nearly 21% over the same period.
Obviously not every child lives close enough to the school to be able to walk or cycle, but for those who do, the school should be encouraging physical exercise not discouraging it. And if more children walked or cycled to school there would be less cars attending therefore decreasing the chances of children being run over.
prison indeed and children should not be forced to be there all day. I grew up in the city and my mom didn’t drive. No buses, we walked home even when we were sick and throwing up. Walking is good. This principal and school district are way over reaching. I would be out of there in a flash. How sad and stupid.
Do the parents who wait in a long line of cars drive onto school property? If so, this sounds like the school is discriminating against parents who are not in cars. The parents should charge the school with discrimination. That seems to get a lot of attention these days. Not to mention that the principal is intolerant and not inclusive.
What is the Principal hiding. The day parents are not welcome and the open door policy is shut down, something is wrong. I would pull my children also as something is not right here.
We have seen an unprecedented decrease in parental rights at the hands of state agencies, particularly in the education sector. The state is bound and determined to wedge itself into the relationship between a parent and the child, evidently with the intent to supersede the parents as the primary decision maker with respect to everything on school grounds. Parents own that school. They paid for it with their hard-earned tax dollars, and they pay the salary of the woman who will have them arrested for exercising parental rights. Mind boggling!
This is all about keeping parents away from the school, so they won’t question anything that is going on there. Parents should have the right to visit a school at any time. Schools should be totally transparent in their practices. I have been told by my children that if they stay too long after school, they will be considered as trespassers. When did schools, which are public property, become off-limits to all of us?! Thirty years ago, a schools grounds were the equivalent to a park, and schools and teachers welcomed students to the school before and after school. Where is there supposed to be a safer place for kids?
WHERE is this at? Do you just assume we know where Bear Branch Elementary School is? And where is Montgomery County?
Investigate Holly Ray. ALWAYS have someone WATCHING HER. Watch her activities, investigate her background, the people she associates with, her finances, and any dirt she has and ghosts or secrets in her closet. EXPOSE HER. Get her fired and then go after the school board and the people on that school board. In other words…Legally find a way to expose EVERY SINGLE MOLECULE Of dirt and filth and inappropriate thing the school has done. Keep up the media exposure and then, file a class action suit against the school district for not allowing free access to education (14th amendment), and then file a lawsuit against the school district for not allowing parents access and observation of THE PUBLIC SCHOOL THEY PAY TAXES ON. These parents have every legal right to sit in class and observe how their children are being taught.
Time to take the school district to task and file lawsuits. Start a petition requesting the removal and replacement of Holly Ray and get as many signatures as you can. We in a very small town in Maine removed our elementary principal by starting a petition. It took 18 months, but she was gone in the time frame I told her she would be…I gave her two years. And, it was her ‘dictatorial” style that was the cause of her dismissal. Our children have ONE SHOT AT AN EDUCATION. This so called ‘principal’ is teaching intolerance, dictatorship, oppression and breaking the law by not allowing parents access to a PUBLIC SCHOOL!