Jade from Edward Sharpe came out before the show and chatted us up! She’s literally the best and was nice enough to sign my wrist band!

JADE FROM EDWARD SHAPRE SIGNED MY WRIST BAND!

EDWARD SHARPE WAS SOO AWESOME!!!

justinspoliticalcorner:

There’s a danger looming in schools today that’s putting our nation’s most vulnerable children at risk. Around the country, teachers and administrators are struggling to meet the needs of a growing population of disabled students, who are entering school environments ill-prepared to educate them responsibly, thanks to a lack of both adequate training and resources. This lack of preparation for handling students’ special needs is, in turn, sparking a disturbing and dangerous trend: the use of harmful “zero tolerance” policies that end in seclusion, restraint, expulsion and – too often – law enforcement intervention for the disabled children involved.

From coast to coast, the incidents are as heartbreaking as they are shocking:

• In Brooklyn, NY, G.R., a 5-year-old autistic student, was traumatized when police were called to his school because he was having a temper tantrum. He was physically removed from the school by police, strapped to a stretcher, and when his family members tried to advocate for him, they were allegedly handcuffed. His grandmother’s ribs were broken in the altercation.
• In Albuquerque, a 7-year-old with autism was handcuffed by police officers called to restrain him. His “offenses” included calling other children names, knocking over chairs, spitting, and shooting rubber bands at a police officer.  
• Tony Smith, a disabled student suing the Atlanta Police Department and his former school district, claims he washandcuffed to a filing cabinet for seven hourswhen the school investigated a crime that had taken place on campus. The officers involved, his suit argues, violated department policy and his civil rights.
• In 2010, autistic student Evelyn Towry made national headlines when she was arrested after becoming agitated because her teacher wouldn’t let her wear her favorite cow hoodie. Her Individualized Education Plan (IEP) detailing her needs and how they should be met specifically included a clause allowing the school to contact law enforcement in the event of disruptive behavior, though her parents claimed they neither saw nor approved the document.

Cases like these, of students trapped by school policies rarely designed to deal with the nuances of their diagnoses, are growing – and the situation is further clouded by race, class and social factors. These factors can determine what kinds of evaluations, interventions and treatments are provided to students with disabilities or suspected disabilities, and ultimately decide whether children are able to successfully complete their educations, or fall by the wayside.

Such situations are growing extremely common across the United States, with school districts calling on police to handle routine disciplinary infractions rather than dealing with them on their own. Many have adopted harsh zero-tolerance policies, where infractions are handled with a one-size-fits-all model, regardless of age, ability or the larger context in which they took place. These policies can effectively set some students on the path of what the Florida ACLU calls a school to prison pipeline — and, notably, many of the victims of this system, like Salecia, are minorities.

Racial disparities when it comes to school discipline are well-established in the United States; students of color are twice as likely as their white peers to be subject to out-of-school suspensions, according to the Department of Education’s 2012 Civil Rights Data Collection. Yet often, there’s more to these cases than meets the eye, because many of the minority students who find themselves harshly penalized also happen to be students with disabilities, many of them undiagnosed. 

Even without counting the many children with undiagnosed disabilities in schools today, we know that the overall number of disabled students in our public school system is on the rise. Increasingly, school districts are tasked with educating students with a wide range of intellectual, cognitive and emotional disabilities, rather than physical disabilities, as in prior decades. In theory, our ability to identify these disorders earlier than we could in the past should ensure that students get the support and access they need to succeed in school, with individualized education as appropriate. But in practice, the rise in disabled students is crunching school districts terribly, as funding for these students has not at all kept pace with the rise in diagnoses. As a result, many schools are now hard pressed to serve their students’ educational needs and deal with disciplinary issues.

As funding for special education drops and available staff members dwindle – and as disabled students with behavioral problems are increasingly mainstreamed in response to changing thinking on disability education – discipline is becoming a large problem in a growing number of mainstream classrooms. In response, some districts have decided to bring out the heavy guns for handling disruptions associated with disabled students; from outbursts in class to tantrums in the hall, the new go-to solution in many districts is to call the police.

In addition to calling on law enforcement, Disability Rights Oregon notes that there has been an uptick in the use of restraint and seclusion in schools, as well. The organization points out that these practices appear to disproportionately target disabled students, and can be fatal in some cases.

H/T: S.E. Smith at AlterNet

destroythegop:

nefariousnewt:

micwiljr:

This says it all for me.  That’s a serious political B-Boy stance from POTUS Obama and VP Biden.

We’ve got your back.

It’s going to be so awesome watching these two go up against a Bush Republican Ticket of Job Destroying Liars with ZERO Foreign Policy experience.

usagov:

Image description: A picture of the solar eclipse that happened over the weekend taken at Arches National Park in Utah.

Photo from the National Park Service.