RSS2 Zealous Moms, 2 Educational Travesties
Gene Lalor | January 27, 2011
A frustrated Ohio mom and a religious New Hampshire mother have discovered that educating kids isn’t as easy as it may seem.
Kelley Williams-Bolar was sent to jail by a judge because she wanted her kids to get a decent education and Brenda Voydatch’s child was sent to public school by a judge because she wanted to instill her faith in her daughter and home-teach her.
Aspiring teacher and current teacher aide Williams-Bolar was fed up with the atrocity which passes for public education in America and she did something about it: She cheated, lied and was caught.
Four years ago, frustrated with the poor education her daughters were receiving in her Akron neighborhood schools and fearful for their safety in her crime-plagued area after their home was burglarized, Williams-Bolar tried to scam the system. With the complicity of her father, she registered the girls in the nearby, highly-regarded Copley-Fairlawn School District.
The district hired a private investigator to look into her actual residence and determined that Williams-Bolar’s kids lived in Akron. After refusing to compensate Copley-Fairlawn by paying $30,000. in retroactive tuition, their mother was accused of falsifying records and filing false court papers and jailed for 10 days.
Few would fault Williams-Bolar for her motivations, protecting and educating her daughters. As she said, “It’s overwhelming. I’m exhausted. I did this for them, so there it is. I did this for them.” As Copley-Fairlawn officials said, she was cheating because her daughters received a quality education without paying taxes to fund it: “Those dollars need to stay home with our students.”
See the story and an ABC News clip here: http://tiny.cc/1jnga
There’s a larger issue in all this, and that issue does not involve discrimination against Williams-Bolar and her daughters because they are black. Without specifically alleging bias, that implication was made by Williams-Bolar who claims she was “singled out,” a claim reinforced by a supporter and by the empathetic ABC News commentators.
In point of fact, some hundred other students were investigated and found to reside in other districts. Three families agreed to pay tuition to Copley-Fairlawn, others withdrew their kids, Williams-Bolar fought back and went to jail because of it.
The larger issue is the sorry state of Akron schools as well as many other inner-city schools which are so atrocious that parents resort to subterfuges and illegalities in order to get their children safely educated.
Brenda Voydatch encountered an entirely different, combined educational-judicial travesty. She didn’t want another school for eleven year old Amanda. She wanted to insure her daughter not only received an education but that it was a faith-based, Christian education which Amanda would never get in the public school system and which she could provide at home.
Voydatch didn’t specifically say she wanted to save Amanda from the pagan atmosphere and influences as well as the amoral political correctness that pervade public schools in America today. She simply asserted, “I believe it’s a parent’s fundamental right to teach a child the beliefs within their home. I believe that’s every parent’s right.” Her former husband disagreed and after Voydatch had taught Amanda at home for three years he was able to get a judge to order the child into public school.
Her attorney called that order, that sentence, ”a clear Constitutional violation” based on the judge’s judgement that Amanda “reflected her mother’s rigidity in matters of Faith, and that because of that rigidity she needed to be ordered into government run schools.”
The unnamed judge in the Fox News account thereby not only took unto himself or herself the right and authority to overrule a mother’s wishes but presumed to determine that her “rigidity in matters of Faith,” without defining “rigidity,” disqualified her from teaching and inculcating the tenets of her faith in her own child.
That judge has taken judicial activism and presumption to a whole new level, a level at which a jurist assumes dictatorial powers in a nation which, so far, still accords the freedom to worship as one pleases as outlined in the First Amendment. Brenda and Amanda Voydatch are being denied that most fundamental American right.
The matter has been appealed to the New Hampshire Supreme Court and is admittedly muddled by the complication of Amanda’s father. His attorney contends this is a marital, not a religious case: “It’s not really about religion.” He says the two parents disagree about what’s best for Amanda, adding, “One wants the child very isolated and cloistered and the other wants the child to be worldly and be exposed to all the experiences one ought to have as an adolescent.”
In sum, the mother wants their child taught basic moral principles, the father wants Amanda to attend public school with all its attendant “experiences” of sexual promiscuity, illicit drug use, and, again, that PC philosophy.
What a great dad! What a great system! What atrocities! What total travesties!
Contributor's website: http://www.genelalor.com/
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