School official sues Fox over report parody story in Maine

LEWISTON, Maine --A school administrator who says he was ridiculed and harassed based on a bogus news story is suing.

Lewiston School Superintendent Leon Levesque is seeking $75,000 in federal court in Portland to deter what his attorney Bernard J. Kubetz characterized as irresponsible reporting by Fox News Channel.

The parody, on a Web site called Associated Content.com, was of the school district's response to a prank in April at Lewiston Middle School. Levesque suspended a pupil for tossing a ham bone on a table occupied by Somali students, knowing the Muslims would be offended. Muslims consider pork unclean.

The lawsuit contends that Fox reported the parody as fact on its "Fox and Friends" show on April 23. The show's anchors repeated a comment attributed to Levesque, that "These children have got to learn that ham is not a toy," and that there was an effort afoot to create an "anti-ham response plan."

A Fox and Friends anchor even assured viewers they were "not making this up," according to the lawsuit.

"It appears to me that Fox News acted in a grossly irresponsible way and took some information that was really not very plausible, did not do any substantial fact-checking, and put it out as hard news," Kubetz said.

Levesque said he was overwhelmed for days with phone calls and hate mail, including threatening calls to his home.

Fox did a brief on-air retraction, but Levesque called it unsatisfactory. A Fox News spokesman in New York said the company does not comment on pending lawsuits.

This from the Boston Globe.

Bible classes subject of school lawsuit

DALLAS --Two advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit recently against a West Texas school district on behalf of eight parents who say a Bible course violates their religious liberty.

The American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way Foundation sued the Ector County Independent School District, asking the Odessa school system to stop teaching the course.

"Religion is very important in my family and we are very involved in our religious community. But the public schools are no place for religious indoctrination that promotes certain beliefs that not all the kids in the school share," Doug Hildebrand, a Presbyterian deacon who is among the plaintiffs, said in a written statement released by the ACLU.

The Ector school board approved the high school elective in 2005. It teaches the King James version of the sacred text using material produced by the Greensboro, N.C.-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, and uses the Bible as the students' textbook.

This from the Boston Globe.

Teacher charged with assault for grabbing fleeing first-grader

LAWRENCE, Mass. --A substitute teacher who ran after a fleeing first-grader and pulled the boy down the hallway by his shirt has been charged with assault and battery.

Douglas Tracia, 48, left scratches and lacerations on the boy's neck in the incident, caught on a surveillance camera Tuesday at South Lawrence East School, police said.

"It looked as if someone had tried to strangle him," Lina Tejada, the mother of the 7-year-old boy, told the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence.

Superintendent Wilfredo Laboy said Tracia, of Georgetown, was suspended without pay until the criminal case is resolved. Tracia has worked as a substitute teacher since January.

"These things are very serious matters, and even if it's alleged or unsubstantiated, it's a very serious thing," Laboy said.

Tracia's phone number was unlisted and he could not be reached for comment.

The video shows the boy running down an empty school hallway and through a set of double doors with Tracia running after him. Moments later, the two reappear through the doorway, with Tracia holding the boy by either the neck or the shirt collar. It appears the boy's body swings when his feet are lifted off the ground.

This from the Boston Globe.

Georgia schools cautious on Bible classes

Georgia's public schools walk a delicate line as they decide whether to offer the nation's first state-funded Bible classes -- measuring the difference between preaching and teaching with the likelihood of costly lawsuits looming for those that miss the mark.

The state school board approved curriculum in March for teaching the Bible in Georgia's high schools, but there hasn't been a rush of schools to start up the classes. Only a handful of the state's 180 school districts have agreed to offer the elective classes so far.

This from the Boston Globe.

And this from Texas and the Star-Telegram.

Texas school districts would have to develop guidelines for students to make public expressions of religion under a hotly debated bill that won preliminary approval Monday in the state House.

The measure, House Bill 3678 by Sugar Land Republican Charlie Howard, will face a final vote in the chamber before being sent to the Senate for consideration. It calls for school districts to establish guidelines for students to voluntarily express religious views in “limited public forums.”

Florida student who mooned teacher sues

A high school senior acknowledges he went too far when he mooned a teacher. But he thinks the decision of school officials to send him to a new school for the rest of the year was too harsh, so his family is suing.

Tyler Tillung, 18, mooned a teacher "suddenly and without thinking about the consequences" in February, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday. The teacher had declined to let him into a Feb. 21 school lip sync show that was full. He was suspended for six days and reassigned to a new school.
But the teen wants to graduate with his Palm Harbor University High class in six weeks and complete his final season on the varsity baseball team, the lawsuit said.

This from the Boston Globe.

Judge: District can't ban student speech

A school district violated a fourth-grader's constitutional rights to free speech and equal protection by refusing to allow her to distribute "personal statement" fliers carrying a religious message, a federal judge has ruled.

The Liverpool Central School District in upstate New York based its restrictions on "fear or apprehension of disturbance, which is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression," Chief U.S. District Judge Norman Mordue wrote in a 46-page decision Friday.

This from the Boston Globe.

Not even homelessness deterred 9-year-old's devotion to her school

Brenda Tejeda Baez has endured a lot of chaos in her short life.

By the time she was in third grade, she had lived in five different friends' apartments and two homeless shelters. Her mother is unemployed, and she rarely sees her father, who lives in the Dominican Republic.

When she started kindergarten, she knew only Spanish. Yet, the 9-year-old girl, now a third grader, has refused to budge on the one constant in her life: attending the Louis Agassiz Elementary School in Jamaica Plain.

Even when her family had to live for three months in a homeless shelter in Worcester, Brenda, her mother, and her little brother traveled more than an hour each way on public transportation from Worcester to Jamaica Plain to get to [school].

Read the Boston Globe article.