Rainbow Flags Valued Over Academics

Westwood Education Failing in Academics

BOE meeting Chock Full O’ Activists

Last week the Westwood activists packed the BOE meeting filled with NJEA members, LGBT+ activists and students with the main priority have a rainbow flag or lawn signs in front of the school. The BOE has a flag rule which states that only the US and NJ state flag are permitted OUTSIDE the school. The superintendent made it clear that there are to be no lawn signs OUTSIDE the school. However, LGBT+ flags ARE permitted inside the school and in the classrooms.

But that’s not enough for these activists. They said they won’t feel safe until they are outside the school too. One speaker, a military veteran, stood up and made it clear that the only flag that should make students feel safe is the American flag.

The Bergen County Teachers Union made an absolute clown show of the meeting.

Meanwhile parents stood up begging the BOE not to eliminate the honors program because of the gender disparity. Apparently there aren’t enough BOYS in the honors program so the district was deciding to eliminate it completely, thereby eliminating the scholarship opportunities for the kids .

The teachers in the audience and the student liaison sitting with the BOE, couldn’t care less about academic standards.

The most inappropriate part about that meeting was the relationship between the children and the teachers with these aligned concerns that had nothing to do with academics.

Watch Video

Do you like that attitude of the substitute teacher (time 5:00)? She calls to the BOE to “Resign from all your fucking positions” and called them a “fucking piece of shit.”

These are the people teaching your kids.

Bergen County Teachers union displayed brazen political bias and unprofessionalism during the entire meeting. It was shameful. James O’Keefe (time 9:15) appeared and spoke about the political bias in the schools, saying that he was going to give kids cameras to reveal it.

After the meeting Superintendent Jill Mortimer made the following statement:

“Students are not permitted to make such recordings, and parents are not permitted to send their children in with hidden cameras or other electronic recording devices,” school’s Superintendent Jill Mortimer later said in a letter to the community. “I will take swift action if I am alerted to an accusation that a recording has taken place, including school discipline as well as referral to law enforcement.”

Are the students phones included in the definition of “electronic recording devices”? All the kids constantly take videos from school with their phones and upload publically to social media. So, Good luck with enforcing that.

She can call law enforcement all she wants but she should know that NJ is a one party state. Videotaping other people without their knowledge is not necessarily against the law in New Jersey.

Academics

A presentation was given by Westwood School District showing the % Achievement of meeting or exceeding expectation. In the 2021/2022 school year there is a clear difference in ELA (English Language Arts) between boys and girls, but not in mathematics. There is a 15% to 18% gap in ELA between boys and girls consistent throughout 2016/17 to 2021/22. In ELA, there is a 9% drop, for both genders, in those meeting or exceeding expectations from 2018/19 to 2021/22 which we assume is related to Murphy’s ridiculous mandates on kids. There was no testing in 2020/2021, because like everything else, it was canceled due to Covid.

Math scores seemed to show no significant dip due to the pandemic. Nor that does it show a significant difference in achievements between boys and girls. Their achievement scores in Math to be abysmally low compared to ELA. The charts don’t look that different because Westwood did not put them on the same axis scale, so they may not look different, but the performance in math is abysmally lower than ELA, particularly in girls (19% difference in scores for math and ELA).

Before Westwood decided to just eliminate an honors program, they should investigate these data anomalies. Clearly there should be the same number of honors students in math because that number never really changed significantly in 2021/22. The boys’ scores seem consistent but the girls have an unusually high achievement rate in ELA. The School should investigate why girls seem to exceed in ELA compared to the boys before they decide to scrap the honors program for all subjects.

Back to Flags (The Most Important Topic in School Today)

This week Murphy decided that if a school district takes a NEUTRAL STANCE (i.e., banning all flags, posters, etc.), the State’s position is that a neutral act by a school or Board of Education, even if applied equally to all, is presumptively targeting a protected class under the Law Against Discrimination, meanwhile our schools are eliminating honors programs.