News

Lotsa luck trying to get the pope deposed.
_____

A dream comes true for a girl with Down syndrome as she gets to go to the high school prom:

"I feel like a princess," Casey Carroll, 19, said as she walked to the limousine that was to take her to dinner and her prom at the Fox Theatre. Her mother clicked her camera every five seconds, looking for the perfect shot after an hour of staged photos. Casey Carroll, dressed in a floral gown she bought days after being asked to the prom last summer in the midst of her uncontrollable excitement, smiled as she turned to her mother and said what most teenage girls have said to their mothers at least once: "Mom, stop. You're embarrassing me." But Casey Carroll was not like most girls at the Lassiter High School prom. She was not the prom queen, she was not looking forward to any big after-party, and she was ready to step out of her high heels before she even got into her limo. "When Casey was little, me and her father just thought she would probably never get to go to the prom, because we just weren't sure anyone would ask her," said Sue Ann Carroll, Casey Carroll's mother. "Not only is she getting to go, but she has two great dates. To see that, and to see her so happy, I can't tell you how much that means to us." That's because Casey Carroll, full of laughter, jokes and smiles, was born with Down Syndrome. And as much love as Casey Carroll gives, she receives even more.

_____

A psychologist weighs in on the Jordan Brown murder case.

His dad should be charged with manslaughter for allowing his son to have a weapon.

Misc

Should Philly's superintendent have known about a controversial diversity component in the district?

Ackerman, who has been mentioned on this blog before, is one of the worst administrators in the entire country.
_____

A "deal" save some L.A. Unified jobs:

After months of negotiations, leaders of the Los Angeles Unified School District teachers union announced Saturday they had agreed to a tentative furlough deal that would shorten the school year by one week this year and next, while saving more than 2,000 school employee jobs.

The deal calls for members of United Teachers Los Angeles to take 12 furlough days over the next year and a half. That includes 10 school days and two staff planning days when students were already not scheduled for class.

The plan must be approved by UTLA members, who will vote April 7-9.

District and union officials said they were not happy about having to shorten the school year but, faced with a crippling budget deficit and the potential for devastating job losses and class-size increases, they felt furloughs were the best option.

_____

Twelve-year-old Jordan Brown will be tried as an adult for the first-degree murder of his father's pregnant fiancee. He is certainly one of the youngest people to ever be tried as an adult for murder.

This is the judge's decision.
_____

Miscellaneous

Alaska's Mount Redoubt erupted again last night.
_____

Any other decision than 9-0 in favor of Savana Redding would be an absolute civil rights outrage.

This is so egregious, there can be NO justification for it.

Schools should NEVER be permitted to conduct strip searches.

This writer has reason to worry about the USSC, however:

There are nonetheless two reasons to fear that the Supreme Court will hold otherwise. One is the fact that this case technically involves a "drug." The Supreme Court's recent school cases show the Justices to be susceptible to the same fears of drugs that politicians and the general public have expressed. Thus, in the 2007 case of Morse v. Frederick, the Court appeared to create a new exception to the First Amendment for messages "that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use." In Safford Unified the school district seeks to characterize the strip-search of Redding simply as one seeking drugs—even though Redding was at most suspected of possessing a prescription-strength ibuprofen equivalent to the dosage typically taken in over-the-counter form for a headache. Should the Justices accept the school district's characterization of the search, it could fall into the emerging "Constitution-free school zone" for drug-related cases.

Second, there is a risk that the Justices will fall into the trap of thinking that because the standard for judging the reasonableness of a search is more forgiving for school authorities than for the police, the privacy interests of schoolchildren are necessarily of lesser moment than for adults.

Granted, there may be contexts in which schoolchildren do have less of a right to privacy than adults. For example, the Supreme Court in T.L.O. itself left open the possibility that searches of student lockers might not even be subject to the requirement of reasonableness, because students lack the privacy interests in their lockers that adults have in analogous closed spaces. Yet the same cannot fairly be said about a strip search. Indeed, if anything, the strip search of a girl of thirteen—a point in life when adolescents are typically very self-conscious about their changing bodies—is more intrusive than a strip search of an adult.

_____

A grandstanding prosecutor wants 11-year-old Jordan Brown, who killed his father's fiancee, tried as an adult.

As if this is going to do any good. Eleven-year-old kids hardly any concept of the future at all, let alone understand the consequences of their actions.
_____