Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools has implemented a landmark policy allowing students to take time off to participate in protests.
Beginning Jan. 27, the school district will allow students in seventh through 12th grades one excused absence per year to participate in “civic engagement activities,” according to multiple news outlets.
Fairfax School Board member Ryan McElveen, who reportedly introduced the policy, said the rule may be the first of its kind in the U.S. and was made in response to a recent wave of student activism across the country.
“I think we’re setting the stage for the rest of the nation with this,” McElveen told The Washington Post, who first reported the news. “It’s a dawning of a new day in student activism, and school systems everywhere are going to have to be responsive to it.”
Experts told the Post that the practice of skipping school to attend protests tends to left-leaning causes, such as climate change and gun control.
“People who call themselves conservatives probably do still count respecting authority — staying in school — as a crucial and central tenet of the social order,” said Thai Jones, a lecturer at Columbia University who studies radical social movements.
However, school administrators maintained that the policy was designed to be as neutral as possible.
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Virginia school system implements landmark new policy allowing absences for student protests https://t.co/IUVKMG4qqx pic.twitter.com/bZGIYRWbQs
— The Hill (@thehill) December 28, 2019
I'd have used it to assign more "reading books" and stuff, but that's me. https://t.co/S3K7DxD813
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 27, 2019
I read "Walden" and learned about civil disobedience in my public high school in Chicopee, MA when I was 16. But if schools need a day off for civic activity, maybe one option is to replace that day off with – and this is just an idea – teaching civics. https://t.co/BCJRWFVFXe
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 27, 2019
Now *that* is a day off from school that would be worth it. Even if they're not 18, show them how it's done, take them to the city hall and walk them through it. https://t.co/Nr0bLqZpSM
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 27, 2019
Schools in my neck of the woods have been allowing kids time off to protest for quite some time. Never mind that in my district, about 40% of the kids drop out and something like 60% are functionally illiterate. But hey, they have been well indoctrinated in “social justice” and in public schools, that seems to be all that matters. Schools want an uneducated student body because in their envisioned socialist utopia, an illiterate, totally dependent populace will be easier to dominate and control.
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