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State Board of Ed not the place for limiting education materials and literary content, despite one member’s failed attempt

At the September Kansas State Board of Education meeting, Danny Zeck went on a tirade seeking a new requirement that teachers alert parents when they will have “smut” in instructional materials. We’ll try to unpack how wrong this was from the impropriety of Zeck’s proposal to his telling either Chair Melanie Haas or counsel Mark Ferguson, “You’re full of shit” when they tried to move on after over 20 minutes of discussion. Here are some main points to take away. 1. School districts already have policies for parents to express concerns/exempt their children from reading materials they don’t...
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Extremists Vie for Seats on Blue Valley School Board

Don’t hand your school board over to extremists. From Champions For Lansing Education: “Here’s the thing: the last election didn’t flip the board from liberal to conservative- it flipped from moderate to extreme. The problem is the extremists like 1776 Project PAC & their endorsed candidates are so “Conservative” they see moderate views as a threat. This election, we want to flip it back to moderate. Early voting starts in 1 week- let’s do this.” Originally posted on Facebook on Oct. 10, 2023....
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Interim Committee Discussion of Special Education Plagued with Inaccuracies

In today’s education interim committee meeting, they addressed special education. It is a complex topic, and the confusion among the committee members showed that this would have been better handled by the task force created by the Kansas legislature last session. At the end of today’s meeting, we had one legislator mistakenly referring to phantom teachers (not understanding a district’s teacher count starts as an estimate based on last year’s numbers but is reconciled with actual numbers in June and any necessary funding adjustments made in the June payment). Another legislator didn’t understand that the SPED formula is...
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