Debate on Pledge of Allegiance in Vt. town

[Are_grits_groceries]

WOODBURY — No one's sure when daily recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance fell by the wayside at Woodbury Elementary School.

But efforts to restore them have erupted into a bitter dispute in this tiny (pop. 810) Vermont town, with school officials blocking the exercise from classrooms amid concerns that it holds nonparticipating children up to scorn.

Supporters say the classroom is the place for it, and the disagreement has fueled an increasingly acrimonious debate.

"The whole thing is tearing our community apart," said Heather Lanphear, 39, the mother of a first-grade student.

Unlike other Pledge controversies, this one centers on how and where schoolchildren say it, not whether they should be allowed to.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20081114/NEWS/81114027

Good grief!! These kids are being herded around like cattle. I bet few of them really understand what they are saying.

[struggle4progress]

1. Do Pledge wackos like Ted Tedesco themselves recite the Pledge every day?

I've never met anyone who wanted adults to recite the Pledge daily

The Pledge wackos aren't going into their own workplaces and demanding that everybody there recite the Pledge every morning: they'd be laughed off the site for trying to waste everybody's time

Like other wingnuts, the Pledge wackos are practicing phony outrage

[POAS]

2. Let's have them read the

preamble to the Constitution everyday instead.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Or how about this passage from the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

[droidamus2]

4. I like it

I like your idea. Instead of having the students repeat the same Pledge every morning use it as a teaching tool and have the students memorize many different quotes/speeches (your examples would make a great start) over their school career.

[POAS]

6. It could be rotating quotes that have import

to their current studies or important dates like MLK day, Presidents Day, Flag Day and Veterans Day.

How about this for Veterans day:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."

[rurallib]

7. Maybe a few Mark Twain quotes on the foilbles of mankind?

or maybe some Beatles? sounds good to me.

[POAS]

8. Ooobla Dee Ooobla Dah

[droidamus2]

3. As usual

As usual with people like Tadesco (sp?) (and the prayer in school crowd) they are not so much interested in allowing those that support their position to say the Pledge every day as they are in exposing those who don't want to or who's parents don't want them to hear it. They also don't believe in compromise they want it their way and that's it. I think the school's solution was fine those that want to say the pledge get to those that don't are not required to stand there while it is said.

[cali]

5. oh for pity's sake, the kids are not being herded around like cattle

all the school is trying to do, is keep the pledge out of the class room and give the option to kids, who want to recite it, to do so. It's not a bad solution. And Woodbury is a rather nice little school in a nice community. I know it pretty well- I live just down the road a bit in a neighboring town. In fact, the Woodbury kids go to high school in my town.

[cali]

9. the wingnuts are making a big stink about this. what idiots.

http://romanaround.blogtownhall.com/2008/11/16/take_the_pledge_over_there.thtml

[Comrade Rutherford]

10. I am a parent of a Woodbury School student

As a parent of a Woodbury student let me enlighten you all as to what is really happening here. The AP from last Friday (as linked to above) is a biased one-sided pile of lies.

Major Ted is using mob violence to force out our principal, this has nothing to do with the pledge. From the start, Ted refused to follow the normal procedures for his Pledge recitation demands. He issued a letter at the beginning of the school year ordering the Principal to have the students say the pledge. She did not respond instantly, and Ted went right to a petition. He did get 310 signatures out of over 600 registered voters and 800+ residents.

The school recommended that they school gather together in one place to say the pledge. At first it was one flight of steps up in the common room, but after one week of that, they are now gathering right outside the four classrooms (all on the same floor). The entire school is gathering together as community. A 6th grader gets to lead the students in the pledge and read any announcements. Then the kids go back to their classrooms.

As a far-left liberal, I admire this compromise. The vast majority of our not-even-60 students (grades K-6) come together for this morning ritual. My daughter, who I left this as her choice (and she doesn't say it Monday and Thursday) reported that only seven kids didn't say it today. Some of them were the Jehovah kids.

Ted Tedesco got many signatures. I have heard from several that did sign saying they are satisfied with the daily communal meeting, they feel their reasons for signing the petition have been met and want Ted to stop artificially making trouble in our tiny town.

Ted's petition said 'to recite the pledge five days a week'. And they are.

Last Friday, Ted brought an angry mob into the school, only ONE of whom had a kid in the school, NONE of the rest were parents! They shouted about how our principal was a disgrace and that the school was a disgrace in the same lobby that the students had said the pledge in just seconds ago! The Principal had to ask the to leave because they were being disruptive and disrespectful. Ted refused! Yet the AP reporter says they quietly filed out!

After they left the building, Ted's mob harassed the school-board chair for 45 minutes right outside the main door. Teachers and children were terrified, one student even asked his teacher is they were safe INSIDE THE SCHOOL!

Ted has got what he wanted - the pledge 5 days a week - and he still won't stop! He's incited a mob to trample the Rule of Law and use terrorism to force his will over the majority of towns people. Many people are seriously angry at him for doing that.

Now, Fox News has been running a report all day long saying the students are banned from saying the pledge IN the classroom. This is a LIE, and they know it. There is NO policy forcing the students out of the classrooms to recite the pledge.

The school have received dozens of calls today from right-wing extremists cussing out the 'un-American' school staff. She's a nice woman in her '50s that supports the saying of the pledge! Right-wingers are dumber than a bag of hammers!

[bertman]

11. The pledge of allegiance is nothing more than a conditioning tool to make children believe that

the state is infallible and must be believed and obeyed at all times.

No flag is worthing pledging allegiance to.

Before I volunteered to go to Vietnam in '68 I was a flag-pledging son of a gun. My country was right. My duty was to follow whatever my commander-in-chief ordered me to do.

The first op I went on changed all of that. No more propaganda. No more blind obedience to the flag, country, President, nobody. The blinders fell from my eyes.

We had been lied to and many of us were dying or being maimed because we believed in that fucking pledge to a piece of cloth.

Since that day I refuse to pledge allegiance to anything but my principles, many of which are embodied in the Constitution of the United States.

Turn your child into a fascist robot. Force her/him to PLEDGE allegiance to the flag that George W. Bush wrapped himself in while he was killing our children, robbing our treasury, and trashing the greatest document that human beings have forged--our constitution.

Teach your children the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as some other poster suggested. And teach them the golden rule. That will be the most patriotic thing you will have ever taught them.