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Sep 12Liked by Tom Hayden

Worthy journalism requires in-depth research. FOIAs help in this process. Nevertheless, the motives may reveal other than fair ,truthful facts for further investigation or biases to do harm to an individual, group or institution. The "burdensome" denial may, in some cases, may be a little much. Yet, citizens appreciate a "good try" to be more informed.

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I don't disagree with that!

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“I think they’re a bunch of right wing trolls.” Can you link to a news story demonstrating trollish behavior? They seem like a conservative ACLU.

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Yeah, let me find some stuff. I think the (modern) ACLU is a bunch of left wing trolls, to be fair :)

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Sep 14·edited Sep 14Author

OK finally had a chance to sit down. Here's an example. This link is on the first page of their News section:

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/dei-jps-mississippi/2024/07/25/id/1173953/

PDE sends a FOIA to the school district here and finds: An email exchange from the district later that year between a teacher and counselor revealed a similar situation. A teacher explained to a counselor that a bullied student "doesn’t want us to tell her mom that she is LGBT."

Like, this just seems needlessly cruel. I feel like a lot of their FOIA's are like that - targeting kids and Districts that don't go out of their way to rat on every kid for everything. Like, what interest does this group in DC have in schools in Jackson MS or Winnetka IL? Like, it just seems so targeted specifically to score national political points at the expense of random local people.

I'm not a huge fan of some of the folks getting FOIA'd here in this case but I also don't think they deserve to get dragged into national news for having political ideas that PDE finds distasteful.

I will add: I don't think that Districts should be in the business of lying to parents (it is the government after all). But I also don't think the District needs to be in the business of notifying the parents of any potential thing the child has done which may offend PDE's conservative sensibilities.

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Thanks for responding. Who was going to push against the excesses of left ideological bent of public schools? It wasn’t going to be any progressive NGOs because they would be cancelled. I think that parental notification should be mandated if the school treats the child in accordance with their preferred gender that does not align with their biological sex. This is a far cry from “ratting out” the child about any little thing.

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I would say it depends on the age of the kid and is more like the decision to report other stuff, like behavioral issues, etc. I think it depends on who is told, what is the context, and so on.

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Like if a 16 year old is confiding to a counselor, I don’t think the counselor should go straight to the parents. That seems cruel

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