Controversial book to stay on reading list

Antioch High School has agreed to form a committee that includes parents to review books after an assigned summer reading book drew protests because of its language and description of sexual acts.

Community High School District 117 Supt. Jay Sabatino said this afternoon that after reading the book, he and two school board members decided to keep it on the summer reading list.

“The consensus is we feel it is a valuable read, a good read… . We will continue to offer an alternative if someone wants one,” Sabatino said.

Earlier today, school board President Wayne Sobczak said he doubted the book — “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie — would be pulled from shelves as some parents wanted.

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http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/books/blog/2009/06/parents_seek_to_ban_awardwinni.html

via Read Street:

The English Department at Antioch High School, in the Chicago suburbs, assigned [The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie] for the incoming freshman class to read over the summer. The book, which follows the misadventures of a 14-year-old American Indian boy attending an all-white high school, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and was recognized by both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times in the children’s book category.

The book is described as having vulgar language and describing sexual situations, and these parents want it pulled, even though there is a second option for the assignment, Down River, if parents don’t approve of Alexie’s work.

I thought one school official, John Whitehurst, described the parents’ charge of the school condoning such language and behavior most succinctly:

“That is like saying that because Romeo and Juliet committed teen suicide, we condone teen suicide,” Whitehurst said. “Kids know the difference. Like it or not, that is the way 14-year-old boys talk to each other.”

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Spitting in the eye of mainstream education - Los Angeles Times

Here’s a long article, four pages, at the LA Times concerning a group of three public charter schools that bear the name “American Indian.”  The schools, run by Ben Chavis, a Lumbee from North Carolina, are open to members of any race yet follow a Native theme without the cliche mainstream ideas of Indians, such as “basket weaving” that the school once had before Chalis took control.  The article doesn’t mention how the Native theme is presented in the school today, but it does cover how the privately run charter schools perform higher than most other public schools in California, despite the rather unorthodox ways the school is run. 

From the first page:

School administrators take pride in their record of frequently firing teachers they consider to be underperforming. Unions are embraced with the same warmth accorded “self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best effort,” to quote the school’s website.

Students, almost all poor, wear uniforms and are subject to disciplinary procedures redolent of military school. One local school district official was horrified to learn that a girl was forced to clean the boys’ restroom as punishment.

Conservatives, including columnist George Will, adore the American Indian schools, which they see as models of a “new paternalism” that could close the gap between the haves and have-nots in American education. Not surprisingly, many Bay Area liberals have a hard time embracing an educational philosophy that proudly proclaims that it “does not preach or subscribe to the demagoguery of tolerance.”

AIPCS website
American Indian Policy Blog

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http://64.38.12.138/News/2009/014474.asp

“Edwin Benson will wear a cap and gown for the first time in his life since majoring in the language, customs and traditions of the Nu’eta, a knowledge base passed to him from elders who lived in the last historic earth lodge village of the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota.

Benson has been awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the University of North Dakota. “If anyone deserves it, he deserves it,” said Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa and National Park Service superintendent at Mount Rushmore. “He’s one of the best professors I’ve ever seen. It goes beyond the honorary caption. He goes way beyond a doctor in the academic sense.” Benson, 78, who lives in Twin Buttes, N.D., on the Fort Berthold Reservation, has gained international stature for his vast knowledge of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes. He’s renowned for graciously sharing his knowledge with all people. The North Dakota State Board of Higher Education recently voted unanimously to award Benson with the honorary doctorate. He will receive it Saturday during UND graduation ceremonies in Grand Forks, N.D. “I had a white man call me with great news I never expected from a white man,” Benson said in a phone interview from Twin Buttes Elementary School. “To be honest, I cried. I felt better after I cried. I didn’t know how to accept it. It was like a dream, too good of a dream to be true, too good to wake up.””

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/us/26tribes.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Saturday that $500 million in federal stimulus money would go to American Indian tribes across the nation for schools, housing, infrastructure improvements and job programs on reservations.

Mr. Salazar made the announcement at the United Tribes Technical College here.

He was in North Dakota to visit several places, including an energy center on the Fort Berthold Reservation and the Great Plains Synfuels plant to look at its carbon capture project.

He also planned to visit North Dakota communities that were flooded this spring.

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This time last year I was on a totally different course in life. I was ready to take on Bible College along with the considerable amount of debt that accompanied it.  I figured getting a degree with a well known Bible College would make my work in ministry respectable.  And by throwing around these words like "work in ministry" and "respectable" I mean getting a prestigious paid job within a ministry.  Of course I don't believe that all students in bible colleges around the world are like that.  All I mean is that was how I felt.  It was at bible college where I found that you can be in ministry and still make a pretty good living, which I was all  for.  The only problem was I didn't like the school. 

Sure it was a good school and many benefit from it year after year, but I didn't.  Oh yeah, and my heart motives weren't right. I did find a church body in Portland that accepted me right away.  A Christian and Missionary Alliance church called Mosaic.  By my second visit to the church I was already invited to the worship team meeting.  By my third sunday there, they got me started working on the sound board.  Things came easy at that church.  People there were extremely friendly and open to me.  The leaders were nice to me and accessible, and I even started forming a friendship with the founding pastor of the church.  His heart is in church planting and I believe God's leading me into areas like that. 

I shared with him some of what I was thinking at the time and he listened, and he got excited.  Then he told me to set up a time next semester to talk with him more in depth. Mosaic also had a ministry that reached out to the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon.  The hearts of the people that worked with the churches in Warm Springs were unmatched in love and devotion for Native Americans.  At that church, I was set. But things changed. A year ago today was when I felt an urgency towards discipling Native Americans.  In the years prior I'd received more and more of a hearts desire to see the gospel prepared and delivered to the hearts and minds of America's Indigenous. 

It was God moving me towards them.  It was God sharing his heart with mine and creating a bond, a partnership, with me.  At that moment, praying in the small chapel on Multnomah's campus, was when I discovered that God wanted to walk with me and reach out to and love all of America's Indigenous (from the top of Canada to the bottom most part of Chilé).  And on my birthday in 2008, God gave me a mission, a goal towards America's Indigenous.  A vision that spread to every single tribe throughout North, Central, and South America.  At the end of that intimate prayer time, God told me "now go."  I said "what?"  God said "go." Things just started working out for me in Portland.  Life was settling down.  What did God mean by go? (This post became longer than expected so I broke it up into two segments.  I'll post the next one tomorrow.)

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A Stafford couple is challenging a Needville school dress code prohibiting long hair on boys, saying it will infringe on their 5-year-old son’s freedom of religion.

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