schools

I really hate to say this, but righteous anger is something that has always helped me feel more creative so far as parody goes. If there’s something wrong out there in the world, I do what I can to point it out and try to make it right, using whatever talent that God has given me… and in a way that I hope will make people both laugh and think about things.

So now that Rockingham County Board of Education member Ron Price is apparently trying to start-up the school uniforms thing again, my creative juices have gone into overdrive. A lot of ideas have come to mind in the past day or so regarding the Piedmont’s #1 larcenous elected official.

Here’s my latest work: Ron Price as the Gravemind in a piece inspired by the Halo video game series…

It was a bit hard to do, because Gravemind ...

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Time for another hair-rending chapter in the can’t-end-soon-enough chronicles of…

Ron Price

As was reported here last Monday night, at this month’s meeting of the Rockingham County Board of Education, Ron Price – who almost a year ago was caught stealing campaign signs on the night before the election and has since gone on to become the most arrogant and condescending school board member at least since consolidation took place 14 years ago – tried to get the board to put Standard Mode Of Dress (SMOD) aka “school uniforms” back on the table for discussion. Because there should be “policies” already in place if SMOD is ever approved, Price tried to explain.

In spite of everything that happened at the July meeting, Price actually had the nerve to bring up SMOD again. For sake of “guidelines” he claimed.

But is Ron Price insane enough to try to once again force ...

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Here we go fast and furious: the copy of Transformers: The Score signed by composer Steve Jablonsky has just been listed on eBay!

Bidding starts at $25. Along with the signed CD of the Transformers orchestral soundtrack, you get a Certificate of Authenticity (I spent hours last night trying to figure out the right way to make that out, then wound up going for a pretty-much straightforward affair) verifying that this thing is what it claims to be and why we’re auctioning it. And just for fun, I’m gonna throw in a copy of the online petition – signed by Yours Truly – that may or may not have helped matters along but it sure seems to have raised a stink over the summer, didn’t it? 😛

100% of the proceeds from this sale will be going to help fund some music education projects in the public schools here ...

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After everything that happened at the July meeting, you would think that Standard Mode Of Dress (“SMOD”) aka school uniforms would not come up again anytime soon at the Rockingham County Board of Education. Or ever again for that matter.

Well, tonight it did.

Take a wild guess who brought it up.

Now to be fair, Ron Price did not outright suggest putting the SMOD issue back up for discussion as something to be immediately implemented (all hell would have broken loose on the far opposite side of the table if he had tried to). But the mere fact that Price spoke at length about wanting to have policies and guidelines already in place and ready for SMOD “in case” it is ever implemented, is troubling enough. I also happened to notice that Price spoke about SMOD as if it was something that the administrators and faculties of schools ...

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A federal judge has ruled that two New Jersey students can continue wearing buttons depicting the Hitler Youth as part of a protest against school uniforms, Fox News is reporting…

U.S. District Judge Joseph A. Greenaway Jr. sided with the parents of the students, who had been threatened with suspension by the Bayonne school district last fall for wearing the buttons. However, the judge added in his ruling that the boys will not be allowed to distribute the buttons at school.

“I’m very pleased,” said Laura DePinto, mother of one of the students. “I think it upholds the most basic of our American rights, which is to protest peacefully.”

Citing a 1969 case in Iowa involving students who wore black arm bands to protest the Vietnam War, Greenaway wrote that “a student may not be punished for merely expressing views unless the school has reason to believe that the speech

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This morning I was going back though the past few months of blog posts looking for something I’d written pertaining to education. In the course of searching I found the video of WGSR’s Star Talk on June 14th where Mark Childrey interviewed me about my plans to address the July 9th meeting of the Rockingham County Board of Education while dressed as a Jedi Knight. It was all to protest the “Standard Mode of Dress” (legalese for “school uniforms”) at Reidsville Middle and Reidsville High schools that the board had approved.

As was reported here a few weeks later, the board wound up rescinding the earlier vote to implement the policy after POTSMOD (People Opposed To Standard Mode Of Dress) turned the meeting into a media spectacle with picketing by students, black armbands and not just a Jedi but an “escaped convict” too 🙂

Well, I watched the video ...

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It all started a little over a month ago, and the very strange tale of how we wound up with a life-sized statue of Yoda in our home. Bear in mind that Brian Hodges wanted it to go in his new office at Mercer University and since he’s teaching cello, he was going to replace Yoda’s lightsaber blade with a cello bow. But he didn’t have enough room and so Yoda came back to North Carolina from Atlanta (after already coming up from Florida) and ended up in our “foster care”.

The thing is that even at life-size, Yoda takes up considerable space. Lisa and I didn’t really know what to do with him. But then an idea came to us. Or to be more accurate, the notion came to mind to “adapt” Brian’s original idea…

Let’s put Yoda in Lisa’s music classroom at school! That way Yoda would have ...

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Over 300 students – more than a third of the entire student body – at Eastern Guilford Middle School were detained part of the day on the first day of school yesterday because of dress code violations.

These included wearing even the wrong kinds of belts.

How much real education went on yesterday because the teachers and faculty were spending so much time looking for dress code violations?

This is one of the reasons why P.O.T.S.M.O.D. fought and beat the school uniforms when the Rockingham County Board of Education tried to impose them on Reidsville Middle and Reidsville High schools for this new school year. Because we understood that considering all that goes on in a school day, that teachers shouldn’t be given unnecessary tasks that take priority over everything else already on their plate. Be mindful that this isn’t the normal, sensible dress code in the traditional sense, but ...

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TVShowsOnDVD.com has the scoop on what to expect with next month’s long-awaited (well I sure have been wanting this anyway 🙂 release on DVD of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles – Volume 1.

In case you never saw this, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was a show on ABC that started in March of 1992 and ran for a year or so on-and-off. The brainchild of George Lucas, Young Indiana Jones Chronicles followed, well, young Indiana Jones on adventures from the time he was 9 on up into his early twenties. We got to see Indy meet T.H. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Howard Carter (discoverer of Tut’s tomb) in the burning sands of Egypt, all the way to fighting in the trenches of World War I and then as a college student in Chicago where he was roomies with Elliot Ness. It was an amazing show that happened to ...

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I have to quite seriously wonder how long will it be before this is becomes proposed for schools here in Rockingham County, North Carolina. I mean, we’ve already got at least one school board member who has said that students are there to learn how to “find a job” and not how to be individuals.

This same school board member re-affirmed that to me rather strongly at the meeting the following night, by the way. I honestly can’t see it as being too far of a stretch for him to be in favor of something like this, either…

Students at many high schools across the country are being forced to pick academic “majors” as early as 9th grade, according to a story in today’s The New York Times…

Ninth graders often have trouble selecting what clothes to wear to school each morning or what to have for lunch. But

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