Vermont: Students who Want to say Pledge of Allegiance Kicked out of Class.....

When exactly did Vermont become a cesspool of liberalism?......

WOODBURY, Vt. - No one is sure when daily recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance fell by the wayside at Woodbury Elementary School.

But efforts to restore them have erupted into a bitter dispute in this town of about 800 residents, with school officials blocking the exercise from classrooms over concerns that it holds children who don’t participate up to scorn.

U.S. schoolchildren have long been able to opt out of reciting the pledge for religious reasons. But unlike other pledge controversies, this one centers on how and where schoolchildren say it, not whether they should.

“The whole thing is tearing our community apart,” said Heather Lanphear, 39, the mother of a first-grader and an opponent of reciting the pledge in the classroom.

The brouhaha in the Vermont school began in September, when parent Ted Tedesco began circulating petitions calling for the return of pledge recitation as a daily practice in the 19th-century schoolhouse, which has 55 children in kindergarten through sixth grade.

School officials agreed to resume it as a daily exercise, but not in the classroom.

“We don’t want to isolate children every day in their own classroom or make them feel they’re different,” said Principal Michaela Martin. (what about the kids who are forced to leave? -ed.)

Instead, starting last week, a sixth-grade student was assigned to go around to the four classrooms before classes started, gathering anyone who wanted to say it and then walking them up creaky wooden steps to a second-floor gymnasium, where he led them in the pledge.

About half the students chose to participate, Martin said.

Tedesco, 55, a retired Marine Corps major, and others who signed his petitions didn’t like that solution, calling it disruptive and inappropriate because it put young children in the position of having to decide between pre-class play time and leaving the classroom to say the pledge.

“Saying the pledge in the classroom is legal, convenient and traditional,” Tedesco said. “Asking kindergarten through sixth-graders who want to say the pledge to leave their classrooms to do so is neither convenient nor traditional.”

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Comments

[JDAM]

Sigh....

[Codekeyguy]

It's Vermont. The state with Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. The state that wants to secede from the Union, see www.vermontrepublic.org/
Great state, Vermont!!

[pulsar182]

Half the class said the Pledge of Allegiance, the other half said Fuck America...

[Robin Grant]

Conservative columnist: Why the GOP should be 'giving up on God'I am a parent of a 1st grader at Woodbury School. The pledge is NOT banned from the classroom! The way our students say the pledge right now is a wonderful sight to behold.
At 7:55 AM 95% of the 50+ students (k-6) join together as a community. A sixth grader is honored by reading the day’s announcements to the assembled group and then leads the entire school in saying the Pledge. I counted only 7 children on Monday that did not partake in saying the pledge, some of those kids are Jehovahs and some are abstaining, this is as it should be in our great nation.
For the last ten years, our school only said the pledge once a week, at the school-wide assembly on Wednesdays. Late last school year, the pledge was accidentally left out of that meeting, no one can say exactly when, but it was NOT intentional. At the start of this year, one parent wanted to make sure it was not forgotten, but he did not follow established procedure. He had a brief phone call with the principal and she made sure it was said at the weekly meeting. But this one parent decided he was not satisfied, so instead of going through the proper channels, he jumped right to the last step and created a petition calling for the pledge to be said 5 days a week.
Out of 600+ registered voters and 800+ residents in the town he collected 310 signatures, a respectable amount. After he submitted his petition to the school, the staff and the board decided to honor his request. At first, they extended the existing procedure, to assemble all the students in the Auditorium/Cafeteria on the top floor, just like they do for the Wednesday meeting. After a week of this it was realized that this was impractical and the school staff changed the procedure to assemble the students just outside their classrooms in the foyer. The staff’s primary thought was to keep the students together as a whole community, NOT to ‘ban them from the classroom’!
At least 20 of the other parents that I have talked to that DID sign the petition are satisfied with this communal recitation led by an older student. It recalls to use our old one-room school houses where the older students helped teach the young ones. The sixth grader’s, incidentally, also have a ceremony to take down the exterior flag at the end of the school day and they properly carry the flag into their classroom to fold it correctly.
This is all as it should be.
But this one parent that started the petition refuses to stop, even though he told me directly that he personally would be happy with only one day a week! He is still out there, trying to split our students and teachers and parents apart.
Last Friday he led an angry group of Woodbury residents (only ONE had a student at the school) inside the school and they started shouting about how the students gathering together and being led by a sixth grader was a ‘disgrace’ and how the principal was disrespecting the pledge! When they were asked to leave for being disruptive, they initially refused. Only after the principal insisted did they go outside. They stayed right outside the front door and harassed the School Board chair for 45 minutes! And the school board chair is a Christian home-school advocate that supports saying the pledge!
Students inside the school actually asked their teachers if they and the principal were safe from the angry mob right outside their window! The school staff and students are TERRIFIED of this man now.
Yesterday Fox News ran a story full of lies claiming that we have ‘banned the pledge’ and ‘banned God’ from our classrooms. They KNOW it’s false, one of the parents quoted in the AP article last Friday very clearly informed the Fox producer who called her exactly what is the real situation here. Just this morning Fox had a segment on our school and had the petitioner and one of the signers on live, nationwide. Yet the host wouldn’t let the other guy get his point across, which is this: He signed the petition asking for the pledge to be said 5 days a week, and now it is and he’s happy with it. The Fox host (I think it was Doocey) interrupted him and wouldn’t let him finish his thought!
Starting last Friday, our school and some parents and school board members have been getting phone calls from crazy people all over America calling us Communists, saying we should all be rounded up and deported. Our school secretary has been cussed out over the phone several times a day from Conservatives screaming at her, calling her names and such. That has got to stop!
This is a NON ISSUE, folks! There is NO policy to prevent students from saying the pledge inside the classrooms! We, The People, WANT our kids saying it together as a group.

[Ted Tedesco]

I am Ted Tedesco, one of the individuals standing up to the extremist elements in Woodbury who are opposed to the recitation of the Pledge. Robin Grant is not to be believed. He is 100% opposed to the recitiation of the Pledge anytime and anywhere. He has spoken out publicly against it at the School Board meeting as has his wife. He creates a fiction that what has been reported in the local papers, the local TV station WCAX, the Burlington Free Press, the Boston Globe, the Associated Press and Fox and CBS never happened. The story is that the Pledge is banned from the classroom. There was no mob and there is no Pledge in the classroom and Grant continues to work to abolish the Pledge whereever it is said. Check out my blog for more truth and take a look at the threatening e-mail Grant's wife sent mine. The e-mail is posted on the blog. Go to SaveThePledgeOfAllegiance.blogspot.com Best wishes, Ted Tedesco, Major USMC (Retired)

[Foragoodtimecallnancypelosiat8675309]

ribin stfu you godless cunt your no better than the muslims who like you want us to believe in what you belief or their will be grave consequences