Please Bring Back Halloween and Other Holidays

This is a note to schools. Give our kids back their holidays and their fun.

What happened to the schools I used to attend from the 1970s through the 1990s? The elementary schools kids had a great time. They dressed up for Halloween, got candy, and paraded up and down the street. It was a wonderful break because kids do work hard in school and deserve fun.

Kids could hear the Thanksgiving story about the Pilgrims without some left wing guilt trip about the Indians.

Kids celebrated Christmas with a nice party that featured cookies, Kool Aid, and giving the teacher some decent but inexpensive gift. Santa Claus, lights, and Merry Christmas signs were everywhere.

St. Valentines Day meant that the children exchanged little Valentine cards with most folks and big ones with their close friends. No one considered whether or not celebrating in this manner gave Catholicism an undue influence over children. No one cared that some sensitive kid might get his or her feelings hurt if they didn't get the big card from some other kid.

Schools needed these releases for both teachers and students. A few days of fun per year do not detract from instructional time that much. If they do, who cares? They are children after all. Schools have become places where adults force society's strange hangups on kids, mostly forcing them to abandon the idea of fun.

Please bring back holidays. let the kids have some fun, especially on Halloween.

State Sponsored Sexual Assault Up For Debate in the Supreme Court

Imagine a teenage girl forced into a small room. There she is ordered to undress by force. Adults leer at her nude body, examining it closely. Then she is told to dress and go on her way.

This was not a kidnapping, this actually happened at a school! In America!

In Safford, Arizona several years ago Savana Redding, described as a "shy and nerdy" eighth grade honor student, was forced to undress by a vice principal. Did they suspect she was armed, about to kill a fellow student? No. Was she about to offer heroin to a classmate? No.

They suspected that she had contraband ibuprofen in her underwear. No, check that. Extra strength ibuprofen. Worse than anything else, the students knew what had happened to her. When her mother April protested, she was told that her daughter was lucky that nothing was found.

She was scarred for years, humiliated by the event. Redding feared going to the school. Who could blame her? An institution of the state basically raped her and neither she nor her parents could ever hope for justice against the perpetrator.

Fortunately, in one of the few good rulings you will ever see from here, the 9th Circuit stood up for Redding's civil liberties. If a strip search is not a violation of the right to be secure in your person, what isn't. Also in this day and time when improper contact between teachers and students is reported from somewhere almost daily, who wants to trust these people with this kind of power?

Were I in Arizona, I would tell my children to refuse any orders to remove clothing unless they could produce a warrant signed by a judge, as is required by the Constitution. If I found out that they had been strip searched, I would be the next one in jail. These are not prisoners, these are children. They do not leave every constitutional right at the door when they enter school. If the Supreme Court rules that they do, it is time to abandon the public school system in states that allow such monstrous practices.

No wonder civics is not taught anymore in many areas. Why would administrators such as the vice principal in Safford want these children to understand the Bill of Rights? It is so much easier to terrify them into submission, over ibuprofen.