[continuing] Anyway, the more investigation
that we've done from across the country is that, when sex education was
instituted in the school system to try and cut down on the number of
unwed mothers, etc, etc, etc, it has done nothing but the reverse. And
this is all across the country. This is not just Chapel Hill. But the
unwed mother rate has increased, so we're saying, you know, why are you
concentrating on this, why is it necessary to pass out condoms in the
high school. Why aren't you concentrating on the academics.
But of course, the newspaper and the radio are saying that we're
bad-mouthing the school board, and we weren't bad-mouthing the school
board — although we did poke some fun, because we, at the end of the
year, when we found out they had only passed out 6 condoms, and they had
gotten something like 3000 condoms from the Orange County Health
Department, and 1000 were taken into the school and the other 2000 were
left in the trunk of Edwina Zagami, the nurse's, trunk of her car [laughter] . So obviously these were no
longer any good.
You know, the sheer idiocy of it, to us, was so funny that one of our
members got a plastic banana and put a condom on it and sprayed it with
gold paint and mounted it and gave the school board a Golden Condom
award. They did not appreciate the humor in it, unfortunately. We were
just trying to make a jestful, you know, gesture, about this whole
thing. It's so ludicrous. But like I said, they did not appreciate it.
We also presented them, I guess our two foibles, we also presented them
with a Golden Waffle award, for the Lavonda Burnette issue [ref. is to
African-American member who was pressured to resign on discovery of
inconsistencies in her record].
The more we investigated the real serious crimes of the school board, if
you will, have been instigating these outcome-based education programs
without properly training the teachers, without the funding, without
proper notification and support from parents.
About the only one that was probably attempted to be done upright and
forthright, was the School Within A School, because they got 300
children to sign up for that program.
We found out the other night from one of our members — she's not a member
of Putting Children First, she's one of the people that's thinking about
running for school board — said that as far as she understood, that the
School-Within-A-School concept
Page 16 was to teach
English, science, math and history interconnected and teach them
altogether. And that they did not have a good math teacher, number one,
in the School-Within-A-School, and so probably 90% of the kids failed
math in the School-Within-A-School group, and 75% of the kids did not
sign up for it the next year.
However, the school board went ahead with it anyway. It did work for some
children. But it did not work for 3/4 of the children, and yet the
school board, through their membership in the Coalition of Essential
Schools [a RI-based program promoting integrated curriculum and
outcome-based education] are planning now to implement this School
Within A School concept systemwide. And yet for the last nine months,
they've been lying to us about it, saying that they have not been
planning to do this.
And yet, the reason we found now that McDougal School is shaped the way
it is, and high school and the new elementary school that are being
built now, between now and 1996, are also going to be shaped similarly,
in other words, 4 little academies or buildings that are almost twice as
expensive as they should be. Steve Halkiotis at the Orange County
Commissioner meeting last summer had a whole book of elementary school
plans — the cheapest on being a rectangular box with two stories — —4
million dollars. And he said, "yes, this is the cheapest school that we
can buy." And we said, okay, fine, so you make it all one story, make it
L-shaped or V-shaped or whatever — it's going to cost maybe —6 million
dollars. We could get 2 elementary schools for the cost, what they're
spending, on one elementary school, because it's shaped like a
Battlestar Galactica-kind-of-a-crab-shape with an open thing in the
center, and they're using the, the propaganda, if you will, that it's
great because we need more light and a better environment to teach our
children.