Praise from "Rogue-ner" Should Raise Antennas Automatically
A round-about thanks to Mirror columnist "Rogue-ner" for reminding me, through keeping a watch on his roguish column, to write about child and school issues a liitle sooner than I might would have otherwise. "Rogue-ner," in his recent column, is full of praise for Federal Way school superintendent, Tammy Campbell, but the jury is still out on her performance. Campbell seems firmly implanted in Jim Ferrell's ("Pharaoh's") camp, given some of her recent remarks, and that already is a big concern about her since public school officials should publicly be neutral when it comes to politics and political candidates.
Regarding the role of schools and children generally, we need to keep a firm, or oppositional, watch on bureaucrats and politicians who often seem to think that children are the wards of the state rather than the natural responsibility of parents, as parents, after all, are the God-given (natural) protectorates of their own children and have sole natural rights to their upbringing and standards. Parents have every right whether to send their kids to regular schools or to have home school instead, whether to let their kids have broader freedoms than what the state often wrongly imposes or not, to determine whether to have vaccinations or not, and what kind of medical treatments, if needed, that their children undergo. Irregardless of state or federal constitutions (which generally affirms parents' basic rights, but should be more broad and specific through future amendments), these are the natural rights of parents, and cannot morally be taken away by any politician, bureaucrat or government.
Parent and teacher/educator/administrator meetings, such as PTA meetings, especially in public schools, should be common and better organized, as parents have every right to determine, pretty much through pure democracy, but also through elected school boards, the curricula and standards in which their children are taught ("Warden Rogue-ner" presumptuously used the term "our children" in his recent column). Schools should refrain from political or philosophical indoctrination apart from a basic and neutral teaching of civics and universal precepts of morality.
If Tammy Campbell agrees with the basic premise of this essay, and her actions as superintendent are as good as her talk, then maybe she will turn out to be a good, or perhaps great, superintendent for our city's schools -- who knows? -- but praise from "Rogue-ner" raises antennas automatically, at least this one.
-- Mark Greene (F.W. Exploratory Mayoral Committee)
[Revised on 9/24/16.]
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