Virginia
Virginia mom blasts sons’ ‘political’ suspensions for not wearing masks
SPRINGFIELD, VA — Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a mom of three, accused Fairfax County Public Colleges (FCPS) of taking part in politics after her sons have been suspended on gown code violations for not carrying face masks to high school.
Lundquist-Arora’s sons have been amongst 24 FCPS college students suspended Jan. 25 for failing to put on masks.
“The masks had given them complications,” Lundquist-Arora instructed Fox Information Digital. “They didn’t like carrying them. So that they discovered them problematic.”
Her two youthful boys have been suspended for 15 days from Hunt Valley Elementary College, however she mentioned she has “not heard again but” from the principal about her enchantment requests. She appealed her older son’s suspension in an electronic mail to Irving Center College Principal Cynthia Conley, arguing it was inaccurate, deceptive, and flew within the face of rights of privateness and political freedom. She was adamant that the varsity’s motion was additionally in violation of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s, R., Government Order 2, which requires Virginia colleges to permit dad and mom to choose their youngsters out of the masks mandates nonetheless in place in some Virginia colleges.
Lundquist-Arora argued that based mostly on the state regulation, he was totally inside his proper to be maskless and that native gown code mandates don’t supersede state regulation.
Her enchantment was denied final week, with the principal writing within the faculty’s resolution that, “because of his refusal to put on a face masks, the gown code violation was recorded and a consequence was given.”
Lundquist-Arora expanded on why she noticed the transfer as political in an interview with Fox Information Digital.
“I additionally suppose that my sons are being punished for political causes,” she mentioned. “We had the audacity to truly train our rights underneath the governor’s order. They usually’ve by no means objected so fervently to something that Gov. Northam has completed up to now. There was by no means a difficulty the place Gov. Northam would move an government order and the varsity board would say, ‘Oh we’re not listening to that, and we’re going to move a coverage to avoid that.’ So I believe that that is undoubtedly political.”
The parent-activist mentioned she had recognized a touch of irony in her son’s punishment.
“Mockingly, truly, once I got here to select up my son, at one level I believe within the counselor’s workplace or wherever they held him, there’s an indication that claims, college students who, in an effort to keep on the right track for commencement, college students mustn’t miss greater than 9 days within the faculty 12 months,” she mentioned. “And I assumed that was significantly ironic on condition that they simply willfully suspended him for 9 days over a chunk of material over his face, or not having one.”
Lundquist-Arora nervous her son’s suspensions can be an “obstacle to furthering his educational pursuits.” Her older son’s 9-day suspension, she famous, makes it seem as if he’s an offender on par with drug sellers or worse. In actuality, she mentioned, “he’s a conscientious, straight-A scholar who has by no means been in hassle apart from for these politically-charged ‘gown code’ violations.”
As for subsequent steps, Lundquist-Arora mentioned she’s going to “pursue authorized avenues to struggle” and goes to enchantment to the state board of training.
“I’m hoping that on the finish of the day, justice will prevail and these will probably be erased,” she mentioned. “That’s all I can do is hope and struggle it. That is fully ridiculous.”
Irving Center College and Fairfax County Public Colleges didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The mother has fought in opposition to different measures in latest months, together with a brand new rule which might droop or expel college students for “maliciously misgendering” their friends. The Fairfax County faculty board voted 8-4 to move the coverage in June.
“I believe it’s inappropriate, fully, for the varsity to be concerned in one thing to this point outdoors of basic training for youngsters,” Lundquist-Arora instructed Fox Information Digital.
“It’s clearly an activist board we’ve got. It’s mainly a totalitarian regime. They prefer to ban every part they’re in opposition to, and mandate every part they’re for,” she mentioned.
However she credited the parental rebellion with having made at the very least a small influence. Had they not spoken out, the mom believes the vote “would have been unanimous.”
Once more, Lundquist-Arora mentioned she and her fellow dad and mom had plans to struggle.
“Our subsequent steps are to encourage dad and mom and college students who disagree with the doc to not signal it at first of the educational 12 months,” she mentioned. “We additional will name for a repeal of all language within the doc that compels speech and violates the First Modification.”
Virginia
Good News: Owl surprises Virginia family by perching atop Christmas tree
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Virginia
‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’ (Editorial Board Opinion)
Today, Christmas Eve, we continue our tradition of republishing a 19th century New York editorial writer’s passionate defense of Santa Claus.
The journalist Francis P. Church, a native of Rochester, wrote thousands of editorials for The New York Sun. He is known for just one: an unsigned response to a letter from an 8-year-old girl being teased by her friends for believing in the Jolly Old Elf.
Now as then, Church’s reply to little Virginia O’Hanlon invites us to open our hearts to the mystery, wonder and joy of the season. You can’t help but smile to read:
“Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.”
We wish you and yours a Merry Christmas.
Dear Editor,
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon
115 W. Ninety Fifth St.
Virginia,
Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
“Is There a Santa Claus?” reprinted from the Sept. 21, 1897, edition of The New York Sun.
About Syracuse.com editorials
Editorials represent the collective opinion of the Advance Media New York editorial board. Our opinions are independent of news coverage. Read our mission statement. Members of the editorial board are Tim Kennedy, Trish LaMonte and Marie Morelli.
To respond to this editorial: Submit a letter or commentary to letters@syracuse.com. Read our submission guidelines.
If you have questions about the Opinions & Editorials section, contact Marie Morelli, editorial/opinion lead, at mmorelli@syracuse.com
Virginia
Biden death sentence commutation ‘reprehensible,' says Virginia victim's father
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden announced Monday he’s commuting the sentences of 37 out of 40 federal death row inmates, reclassifying their sentences to life without the possibility of parole.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said in a statement released pre-dawn on Monday, “but guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
While many cheered the move – one Biden defended as in keeping with his administration’s moratorium on federal executions — a local family whose daughter’s killer was among those granted clemency called the decision “reprehensible.”
Speaking to News4 Monday, Paul White said he has waited years for Thomas Hager to be put to death for the brutal slaying of Barbara White.
He learned Sunday from the U.S. Attorney’s office that now won’t happen.
“It’s a disappointment and a loss of confidence in the government to do something like this,” he said, adding the decision “reopens old wounds.”
White said his 19-year-old daughter had fallen into the wrong crowd but was getting her life together when the young mother was murdered in an Alexandria apartment in November 1993.
At the time of the killing, Hager – a local drug dealer with a violent history – was reportedly in hiding and nervous that White, who was friends with his girlfriend, would reveal his location.
“She had visited a friend and saw something she shouldn’t have seen,” Paul White recounted to News4.
That’s why prosecutors say Hager and two others beat, electrocuted, repeatedly stabbed and drowned Barbara in a bathtub. The killers left her 13-month-old daughter with her mother’s body, along with jars of opened baby food for the toddler.
It was Paul White who found them both.
“There’s a constant void,” he told News4.
Hager was convicted in federal court 14 years after White’s murder and was sentenced to death. The jury determined the murder was “especially heinous, cruel or depraved.” Hager has been on federal death row ever since.
Reached by phone, his mother declined to discuss Biden’s decision with News4. His original trial lawyer says he was surprised, but pleased, by the decision.
White’s father said the news was especially hard to take so close to Christmas and called it “reprehensible.” Paul White added the family has waited 18 years for the death sentence to be carried out, adding his family hoped that would provide “final closure.”
Two other men convicted in the killing did not face the death penalty and, according to Bureau of Prisons records, are expected to be released in 2025.
Biden’s move comes with just weeks left in his administration and years after Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a moratorium on federal executions in 2021. No federal inmates have been executed during Biden’s presidency.
The three men who remain on federal death row are Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in a shooting at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013.
Barbara White’s father said he doesn’t understand how they are any different than his daughter’s killer.
“They’re all murderers,” he told News4.
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