We had Lynn Taylor, known as “Common Core Diva,” as a special guest.  Lynn lives in Mooresville (near Charlotte), North Carolina.  She spent 23 years homeschooling her children, and the last one graduated in 2015.  Lynn is admired and respected by Kim Fink, CCTA’s Public Education Committee Chairman for several years as we fought Common Core in Raleigh, and Kim was on last night’s panel, too.  (As were Bob and Mary Griswold, Diane Rufino, and Hal and I.)

Rick introduced the program by saying we were going to talk about technology in the classroom, and he mentioned the fact that Craven County is leasing I-Pads for all its students and teachers in kindergarten through 12th grade, and said the quick reaction of a lot of people will be, “That’s good,” but is it really?  Perhaps there’s another side to it.

Rick asked Hal to give a little background about what Craven County is doing, and Hal did so.  He mentioned something really odd about the process at the Board of Commissioners’ meeting.  The lease costs almost

$1 million dollars per year, but neither the presenter nor any of the commissioners mentioned the cost of the lease.  (Hal knew the amount because the lease itself was among the pre-meeting items posted on the county’s website.)

Lynn added that in 2015, North Carolina increased funds for digital learning with the intention of using the digital mode for learning and for assessments.  In addition, ESSA (Every Child Succeeds Act) provides federal funds for digital learning which the states must compete for. Part of that is to provide money to get wi-fi into the home of each student so that he or she can have access 24/7.

Rick asked Lynn to comment on an article called “Technology: Poison in the Classroom.”

Lynn said there is a move to have technology start in pre-school (from almost when a child is born), and then to kindergarten and on up.  Lynn says that stunts brain development!  (Most of us had heard an early childhood development specialist testify before the Academic Standards Review Commission who spend an hour or so saying the same thing.)

Lynn said that another problem is the massive amount of data that is being stored from youngest student years through joining the workforce via the use of technology, and she mentioned that Apple has the largest data storage east of the Mississippi here in NC.

Rick asked Lynn if what’s going on in education here and what’s going on in the UN have any relationship.  She said they are related, and the key to understanding it are the notions of “collectivism” and “sustainability,” and goals built around the idea of being “green.”  The idea that “technology saves trees,” and “we can’t be one big happy world if we’re not all connected digitally.”  NC has been among the first to hook up to global efforts for education, and NC data is being shared pretty globally; schools share with state agencies, federal agencies, approved vendors, researchers, and more.  Lynn also says FERPA (the “family protection” law) has been gutted by an Executive Order by President Obama.  And she pointed out that data can be collected (without permission) in students’ homes by their school provided devices.  (Is it 1984 yet?)

Lynn was asked why educators seem to be on board with all of this, and she discussed that aspect, but also added that some recent education major graduates are miserably unhappy because they are not encouraged to innovate, but are instructed to “teach to the test.”  She added that there is a huge corporate lobby spending huge sums of money to influence federal and state laws relating to education.  And Lynn said that “psychological intervention systems” are being used in schools, and teachers are having to handle it themselves; psychologists are not being hired.

Lynn says that homeschooling and private schools are going to be dealing with all the things that are going on in traditional public schools that are problematic very soon.  She was asked, “Why???”  She said that one of the ways is by the use of assessments.  She said she had fought and fought to keep the definition of homeschooling as it had been in NC. She said previously homeschooling had 100% freedom, but not so now.  She said it was a conscious effort to “blur the line” between homeschools and “traditional” public education.

Lynn says that ESSA says that “all education must be aligned to one set of standards,” and each student (homeschoolers as well) has a “unique identifier number,” and with nationally normed assessments and that unique identifier, parents can be convinced that their child is “going to be left behind.”

The bright spot in all of this is that there is a campaign going on to get President Trump to resend President Obama’s Executive Order and restore FERPA.  To find out more about this work, parents are advised to go to childabuseintheclassroom.com (child abuse in the classroom).  Lynn advises parents who care about their children to pay attention to that and to pay attention to what’s going on in their child’s school!

To share more of Common Core Diva’s wit, wisdom, and knowledge, go to www.commoncorediva.wordpress.com

Rick opened by opining that the “main stream” media and Hollywood are responsible for the divide in our country, and explained how “cord cutting” is reducing their cash flow.  Cable and satellite providers forward some of the monies subscribers pay them to each of the channels the subscriber can get (regardless of whether the subscriber ever watches that particular channel or not).

Next, Hal gave us the facts about, and we discussed the fact that on Monday the Craven County Schools requested that the Board of Commissioners give them a sizeable amount of money for them to lease I-Pads for every student and teacher in kindergarten through 12th grade.  Several interesting things emerged.  The amount of the request was never mentioned (it was in the online agenda).  The money was to come from the county’s “capital account” (taxpayer monies set aside for bricks and mortar projects) even though it’s to be an on going annual expense.  (This kind of thing is happening in Beaufort County, too.)  And the I-Pads are to be provided for kindergartners and first and second graders in spite of the fact that CCTA members who were on Kim Fink’s Public Education Committee and attended all of the Academic Standards Review Commission hearings in Raleigh heard an early childhood development specialist who testified say that beginning to use electronic devices too early retards the development of a child’s motor skills and is counter productive in the early grades.

We also got into a discussion of the place of real books in addition to electronics which led to a brief mention of the effects of an EMP event and how the likes of North Korea (among others) would love to cause such a thing in America.

Hal mentioned the feed-back we’ve gotten from Scott Harrellson (Craven’s Public Health Director – I think that’s the right title) on our website about what we’ve said about the Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers (FQHCs) in Craven, and he read Mr. Harrellson’s full statement.  Then, by way of contrast, he talked about what Mr. Harrellson said when he was selling the idea of the first FQHC in Craven.  (He was able to do that because he’d saved a hard copy of the power-point Mr. Harrellson used at the time.)

We next got into what the General Assembly is up to, and this includes hearings on new General Assembly districts (NC House and Senate) conducted in locations around the state this past Tuesday (8-22-17).  Hal and I participated in the one held in Washington, NC.  There were a total of 7 locations including one at the Legislative Building in Raleigh, and all locations were tied together via cameras and video.  Rep. David Lewis conducted all the meetings from the Raleigh location, but there were members of the General Assembly and Sargents-at-Arms in each location.  All citizens who signed up had an opportunity to talk.  It began by 2 or 3 people speaking in one location, then moving to the next location, and the next, etc.  Before it was over, it was obvious that not everyone would get to speak using that format, so the connections were shut down, and each location finished as an individual meeting.  Representative Michael Speciale, Senator Norman Sanderson, and Senator Harry Brown were in the Washington location.  Although there were a sizeable number of Republicans in attendance, citizens who spoke seemed to be predominantly members of the NAACP and Democrats who were upset about gerrymandering.  Republicans offered varied suggestions.  Hal’s and my “hot button” was the fact that two truly conservative Representatives (Pittman and Ford) have been double-bunked in Cabarrus County while a much less conservative Representative will have a district all to herself in the same county, AND there is a third district in the same county as well.  Also, Senator Bill Cook (another conservative) will have a new district which is thought to be inhospitable to him.

We talked about “crowd sourcing” (do another duckduckgo search) and how that is developing a large body of information about the subjects that wikileaks leaked.  We didn’t so much discuss the pros and cons of wikileaks actions as what having that information in the public realm has lead/is leading to because of the crowd sourcing approach.  Mary mentioned that both The Daily Caller and Gateway Pundit have good information online on the topic, too.

The last 5 minutes or so is an interview Rick did with Jerry Schill, Chairman of the God & Country Christian Alliance, one of their meetings Rick attended which featured Deborah Dewart (author of Death of a Christian Nation), and the Christian Alliance’s upcoming God & Country Banquet to be held starting at 6:30 p.m. at the Havelock Convention Center on September 18 featuring Judge Paul Newby as the keynote speaker.  Tickets are $20.

We talked about recent events that are attempts to rewrite history and make southerners ashamed of our heritage.  We mentioned events involving Frederick Douglas and Jefferson Davis as two examples that refute many of the accusations currently being leveled at the old south.

Then, we brought ourselves back to current events and proposed the notion that perhaps part of why southern culture/history is under attack is that it is a part of the country that tends to be religions and hold high moral standards, where family values and honesty are important, and right and wrong mean something.  In other words, it is a part of the country where the left’s amoral/immoral ideas tend to fall on deaf ears, so maybe we need taking down a peg or two so that we don’t feel so secure in our world view.

We talked about the NC Governor’s wanting to remove Civil War monuments, and the NC law that prevents that from happening without the approval of the General Assembly, and briefly mentioned the fact that CCTA’s State Legislative Action Committee was present at the House hearing on that bill, and how it was handled at the time.

Rick started us off by observing that in his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, Saul Alensky (sp?) coached the left to make a small number of people seem like more by raising a din.  He went on to say that William Barbour (Moral Monday) and Bob Hall (Democracy North Carolina) had used that tactic in NC, and pointed to recent events when the left stacked the responses to a Board of Elections hearing, and that led to new rules which Rick believes will have the effect of discouraging citizens from calling out cases of voting impropriety that they observe.  Rick believes we (conservatives) need to get better at influencing such things.

We talked about Grass Roots North Carolina’s planning a demonstration in Raleigh (which we observed would be over by the time the program airs) to call out RINOs in the NC Senate for sitting on HB-746, the Omnibus Gun Changes bill which would remove some of the infringements on our 2nd Amendment rights and whose primary sponsors are Chris Millis, Larry Pittman, Michael Speciale, and Justin Burr.  We talked about the committee the bill is stuck in, who the chairman is, and how to use the General Assembly website to send email (or get phone numbers to make phone calls) to ask the chairman and committee members to report the bill out for a full senate vote.  (Timing should be great for doing that.)

We talked about how Article 1, Sections 9 and 10 of the U.S. Constitution forbid the federal government and state governments from issuing titles of nobility and how modern day politicians use the title that comes with their office as if it were a title of nobility for the purpose of making themselves seem superior to the citizens they should be serving.  A couple of examples were given.  One was national.  The other was an action by the mayor of an eastern NC town.

We got into the Raise Act and discussed the various ways passage of it would affect the issuance of future green cards and what that would do to future legal immigration.  We talked about a now deceased CCTA member who was the first member of her family to be born here (her parents were from Ireland), and how passionate she was about stopping chain migration, and how pleased we though she’d be if the Raise Act is passed.

Finally, we just started on the 17th Amendment and what it is, plus the fact that Mike Huckabee has tweeted an appeal to repeal the 17th Amendment, and what Alan West has said on the subject recently.  We ran out of time at that point, so next week we’ll discuss our views on the 17th Amendment and the reasons for them – among a bunch of other things, I can just bet!

We touched on the fact that we’re still stuck with ObamaCare so far in spite of all the promises made during campaigns. 

We discussed the 3 town hall meetings held by NC House member, Michael Speciale (one in each county he represents – Pamlico, Beaufort, and Craven). 

Hal talked about CCTA’s efforts to cross-pollinate and work with people in many coastal counties (plus a few inland counties where we have friends), and how boards of commissioners seem to do the same kinds of bad things in every county, and what kinds of questions need to be asked and answered to evaluate a county’s financial situation and it’s reasonableness, or lack thereof.

We moved on to people’s being fed up with things going the way they are and being serious about wanting the swamp drained.

Then Rick moved us into what CCTA does, and watchdog activities, candidate vetting, legislative action, self education and 5,000 Year Leap classes and willingness to help start them in any nearby area, plus public meetings with speakers were discussed.

We briefly discussed Amendment VI to the U.S. Constitution.

Then we talked about our August 15 speaker, Simon Roche.  Simon is from South Africa and is currently touring the U.S.  He’ll tell us about what has happened there since apartheid ended, and draw parallels with things that are happening here.  I expect it’ll open some eyes.

5th Amendment