DOOM Guide: Facebook Opt-Out Groups For All Districts In Delaware & More

I’ve taken the liberty of creating Facebook groups for each school district in Delaware.  This way parents can get together and plan opt-out strategies together.  I suggested going to the school board meeting in your district, speak for 20 seconds about who your child or children are, that you want them to opt out, and give an opt out letter to the school board president.  The original article for that from a week ago was here:

https://exceptionaldelaware.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/doom-comes-to-schools-in-delaware-parents-go-to-school-board-meetings-this-month-and-do-this-kilroysdelaware-ed_in_de-dwablog-nannyfat-ecpaige-netde-edude/

What do you need to do?  Join your district opt out group on Facebook, and SPREAD THE WORD. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your enemies, tell anyone who will listen!  Just talk about it.  If you want to be really radical, tell people at church, put flyers on windshields at your local grocery store, give them to parents at school sporting events, just do SOMETHING!  Because if you do nothing, nothing will happen.  Share this link on Facebook, put it on Twitter, Instagram, wherever you can!  Make opt out cupcakes for kids at Halloween!

To get a quick link to all the Facebook groups for each district, just go to this list:

Appoquinimink: https://www.facebook.com/groups/811176278901676/

Brandywine: https://www.facebook.com/groups/750657841672044/

Caesar Rodney: https://www.facebook.com/groups/330217710494265/

Cape Henlopen: https://www.facebook.com/groups/659590697473347/

Capital: https://www.facebook.com/groups/capitaloptout/

Christina: https://www.facebook.com/groups/739051449503566/

Colonial: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1492448737676855/

Delmar: https://www.facebook.com/groups/659590697473347/

Indian River: https://www.facebook.com/groups/343734129141847/

Lake Forest: https://www.facebook.com/groups/328549060664391/

Laurel: https://www.facebook.com/groups/375501729267620/

Milford: https://www.facebook.com/groups/578841975553978/

New Castle County Vo-Tech: https://www.facebook.com/groups/703996539678113/

Polytech: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1491857177767603/

Red Clay Consolidated: https://www.facebook.com/groups/290247144492167/

Seaford: https://www.facebook.com/groups/557562024345929/

Smyrna: https://www.facebook.com/groups/640600302723389/

Sussex Tech: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1522571074626892/

Woodbridge: https://www.facebook.com/groups/556125087864842/

All Charter Schools in Delaware: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1477351309213561/

If you want to know all the reasons why Common Core is bad for your child, I highly recommend joining this group:

Delaware Against Common Core: https://www.facebook.com/groups/157115501116902/

If you are against what the Governor Markell, Secretary of Education Mark Murphy and the Delaware Department of Education are doing with the “priority schools”, please join this group:

Delaware Parents Against Priority Schools: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1474847392802505/

I will also keep this in my menu guide with links below the title of this blog.

It’s past time parents started taking their children’s education back and helped to get rid of Common Core and standardized testing once and for all.  It will never happen if you do nothing.  It is controversial, and it will piss people off, but if enough of us do it, things will change.

Capital School District in Dover has a board meeting Wednesday night (October 15th) and already has this on their agenda for discussion.  They want and need parent support.

3.10 State Assessment Parent Opt Out (Resolution No. 15-041)

Parents aren’t the only ones thinking opt out is a good choice, so you are not alone on this if you are already leaning towards it.  It’s a big choice, I understand.  Some may ask if I’ve opted my own son out.  Yes I did.  I did it through a letter to the editor in the Delaware State News, which posted on October 7th.  But if that isn’t sufficient, I will be at the Capital Board meeting, and I will do what I am asking every parent of a student in Delaware to do at a board meeting.  It is actually a relief once you do it, like a great weight has been lifted.  Yes, you will get grief for it, but your kid won’t have to take the test. It may start small and you will feel like a voice crying out in the wilderness.  That’s okay, I feel like I’ve been doing that sometimes for the past six months!  Whatever your differences, where you come from, what you do, who you are- none of that matters.  It’s what’s best for our children.

Please go and join the Facebook page for your district.  I will stay on as admin until things get up and running, and then if you want to be an admin just let me know!  Thank you Delaware parents, and please do the right thing for your child.

Delaware Secretary of Education Mark Murphy Manages To Discriminate Against 5 Different Groups In One Shot @CapeGazette @delawareonline @DoverPost @TheStateNews @NYTimes @washingtonpost @WSJ @ChicagoTribune @LATimes

I called for Delaware Secretary of Education Mark Murphy’s ouster yesterday.  And that was before I even knew about his latest stunt.  At the Wilmington City Council meeting on Thursday night, Murphy had a flyer printed up to show reasons why the State of Delaware wanted to implement the Priority Schools initiative against the six Wilmington schools.  These schools are low income with heavy populations of African-Americans and students with disabilities.  I spoke at the Christina Board of Education meeting a couple weeks ago how the state’s programs have led to a bizarre type of triple segregation with these schools.  Murphy managed to top that with his comments about a school in the Indian River school district in Sussex County, Delaware.

In the flyer, entitled “Priority Schools: An Opportunity To Improve Our City’s Schools Together”, handed out to the public, part of it said the following:

A great Delaware example is Indian River’s Clayton Elementary, located in a rural area of Sussex County with many parents working for the poultry factories.  When Sharon Brittingham took over as principal in 1997, she found a staff that didn’t expect much of it’s low-income, black, Hispanic students.  The teachers commonly used the phrase, “You can’t make chicken salad from chicken shit.”  Brittingham found “teachers didn’t just need to believe in the ability of children to learn but also their ability to teach.”  She helped educators improve their instruction, providing high quality professional development with aid from the district and state.  She also added intensive intervention for struggling students.  And she found teachers needed help with inclusive classrooms, which include students with disabilities alongside their peers.  By the time she retired in 2006, her school was one of the top in the state with proficiency rates of 100 percent in some grades and subjects.  The school faltered a bit when some teachers did away with some of the changes she had put in place.  But the school now is doing well again after it’s current principal returned to some of Brittingham’s successful strategies.

So let’s see here, how many groups can you treat badly with discriminatory statements in one paragraph?  How about low-income, African-Americans, Hispanics, farmers and teachers.  Great job Murphy!  I’m sure this flyer really resonated with the folks up in Wilmington, but not in the way you expected.  It showed a DOE that is clueless about the realities these schools face, and showed their true colors.

Later on in the guide, it states the following hypocritical statement:

DOE has communicated the expectation to the participating districts that engagement of families and the community will be meaningful and genuine.

This one sentence is a summary of what the Delaware DOE has become, a manipulative back-stabbing entity that thrives on bullying school districts to do their bidding.  The DOE forced their Memorandum of Understanding on both Christina and Red Clay Consolidated School Districts, and aside from Governor Markell and Murphy’s impromptu press conference at Warner Elementary School, where the school districts first learned of the blitzkrieg plan, they have done nothing to try to bring the community and parents into their diabolical agenda.  In fact, Christina’s Board of Education chose to ignore the MOU so they could write their own to bring more stakeholders into it, including, you guessed it: families and the community.  If this flyer is any indication of how the Delaware DOE intends to engage with families and communities, someone might want to remind them this isn’t 1860.

Yesterday, Red Clay Education Association President Mike Matthews emailed both Markell and Murphy about how he and many other teachers were extremely offended by the flyer.  Apparently Murphy fanned the flames even more by sending a personal apology to Matthews and other union members, but not to the entire state in a public forum.  Murphy needs to go.  Period.