Category: Children and Families
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Baby, It’s Cold Outside
by Kerry Dougherty On Sunday evening we headed over to the Sandler Center to see Ballet Virginia’s production of The Nutcracker. My granddaughter was in the corps of dancing Ginger Snaps. It was cold, for the Beach anyway. Temps were In the 30s. Please don’t laugh, Northerners. That’s frigid for these parts. I threw on…
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Indictments For Loudoun County School Officials
by Kerry Dougherty Looks like Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares just turned up the heat on Loudoun County. When he was elected, Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order calling for an investigation into what happened in Loudoun County Public Schools, where an alleged predator in a skirt reportedly got a pass for raping one…
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The JLARC Report and Virginia’s Unexecutable School Discipline System
by James C. Sherlock The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) report Pandemic Impact on Public K–12 Education 2022 collected and made available a lot of valuable information. One issue escaped their analysis and recommendations — school discipline. The authors reported student conduct as the number one concern of school teachers, and then failed to address it…
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Why Not Virtual Instruction for Routinely Disruptive or Potentially Dangerous Students?
by James C. Sherlock So, let’s examine a theoretical. A kid gets thrown out of a high school for a suspected rape. The (ex-) superintendent places him in another high school awaiting trial. He rapes again. What’s wrong with this picture? OK, lots of things. But let’s examine just one solution that can have wider…
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Richmond’s Metzger Bar and Butchery Denies Service to Christian Non-Profit
by The Republican Standard Staff On Wednesday evening, an hour and a half before a reserved Family Foundation gathering in a private room, Metzger Bar and Butchery denied entry and service to the pro-family group, solely based on their political opinions and religious beliefs. “It is alarming and disgraceful that this restaurant has a political…
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Grand Jury Report on Loudoun Schools Raises Threat Assessment Issue – Again
by James C. Sherlock Update Dec. 7 at 7:33: LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler was fired yesterday by the school board. That does not begin to resolve the issue of threat assessment. The University of Virginia Threat Assessment Team (TAT), with knowledge of a threat, failed to intervene before tragedy in the case of the student…
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Fathering While Black
by Asra Q. Nomani and Debra Tisler STAFFORD, VA — “They are not taking my baby girl!” cries Sean Jackson, the black father of a beautiful girl, Amoria Adams, 10 months old, holding his beloved daughter. This week, a school board member from Fairfax County, Va., Karen Keys-Gamarra, put in motion a judge’s order that…
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Great Investigative Reporting of a Heartbreaking Story
by James C. Sherlock For a story that will simultaneously make you angry and break your heart, read “Fathering While Black,” by Asra Nomani and Debra Tisler. It is the story of a guardian ad litem (GAL), Karen Keys-Gamarra, who is reported here to have systematically abused her position to pursue a Black father and…
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Virginia’s Northam Learning Gap
by L. Scott Ligamfelter It should surprise no one. After the ill-conceived March 2020 closing of Virginia’s public schools by former Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam, it should have been evident that children would suffer academically. We now know the extent of that damage to fourth and eighth grade students. Virginia’s Secretary of Education, Aimee Rogstad Guidera,…
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Profoundly Unethical: UVa Children’s Hospital Hides Child Gender Transition Information from Public Scrutiny
by James C. Sherlock I published a series of articles earlier this year that criticized the University of Virginia Children’s Hospital on its approach to gender transition in minors as young as 11. As a result, the hospital made at least some movement towards change by announcing it was assigning pediatric clinical psychologists to join…
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Normalizing Pedophilia
by Kerry Dougherty Turns out Allyn Walker is not a lone academic pushing a repulsive agenda. Others in the woke crowd are chiming in. Remember Walker? That was the ODU professor who was sacked last year after this site and others sounded the alarm about how they/them was preaching the gospel of “minor attracted persons”…
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Petersburg Resumes Important Actions Against City Code Violators — Homeless Needs Increase
by James C. Sherlock Sometimes absolutely necessary actions have more than one outcome. Such is the case in Petersburg. Joyce Chu of Petersburg’s indispensable Progress- Index last evening initiated a multi-part series on the impacts of the city’s closure due to safety violations of two motels used by otherwise homeless people. Her first article makes…
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Afghan Immigrants and Their Children in Virginia – Part 1
by James C. Sherlock The flow of Afghan refugees into Virginia has been at a much higher volume than is generally appreciated. I have data on Virginia resettlements of Afghanis from 2016 through the middle of 2021, when the total was 8,560. The current total is far higher as a result of the Kabul airlift.…
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Loudoun’s School Board Special Election
by James C. Sherlock The people of Loudoun County have spoken — just barely. They elected Tiffany L. Polifko to the School Board. Ms. Polifko is a conservative with 20 years experience as a public and private school special education teacher. She currently serves as a Board-Certified Behavior Analyst working with children on the autism…
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From Children-as-Chattel to Pick-Your-Pronoun
by Jim McCarthy Pronouns have now entered the cross hairs of the culture wars, particularly in the discourse about parents’ rights in schooling. Sometimes one longs for the good old days of yesteryear, nostalgic for their simplicity, generally free from microanalytic contention over the spoken and written word. While media is often faulted for contributing…