disturbing news from back east

There was a news item on the week-end that was easy to miss, with all the election stuff, that really got my goat. I don't know that there is much we can do here about it, but if I were a parent in this district I'd be at the next board meeting. Since it surrounds the concepts of inclusion, and the rights of the few to dictate the behavior of the many, I thought you might want to see it:

Gay author no longer welcome to address N.B. students
Pressure from parents
Last Updated: Friday, October 10, 2008 3:58 PM AT
CBC News
A plan to have an acclaimed gay author speak to students in Charlotte County high schools has been scrapped after a few parents objected.
Alex Sanchez writes books about gay youth and their struggle to find acceptance, but local school principals were not comfortable allowing him to address their students.
Jay Remer, spokesman for the Charlotte County Rainbow Support Group, said Sanchez is a terrific public speaker whose message is about tolerance.
He said Sanchez’s mission is “to help the gay youth in the community to feel less isolated and more part of the community as a whole.”
Remer’s group is one of the sponsors bringing Sanchez, who lives in Florida, to New Brunswick.
"The idea was to try and have an audience of maybe as many as 1,500 students," Remer said.
But Sanchez won’t be able to spread his message in School District 10 because some parents have pressured principals, he said.
Keith Pierce, District 10 superintendent, said he changed his mind about allowing the author to speak in area schools after meeting with school principals.
"A few of them were getting pressure from a few parents, and they just weren’t comfortable going in that direction," Pierce said.
Some principals felt their schools were just “not ready” for the kind of presentation that Sanchez will give, he said.
In 2002, the American Library Association named Sanchez’s book Rainbow Boys to the list of Best Books for Young Adults.
Sanchez is still coming to New Brunswick. He will give a presentation at Wesley United Church in St. Andrews.

They weren't willing to go in what direction? Inclusion? Tolerance? By the way, here is the district's mission statement:

The mission of education in School District 10 is to nurture the students so that they have critical thinking skills, appropriate and relevant knowledge, inquisitive minds and independent spirits, with empathy, sense of teamwork and respect for citizenship.

databases

My school has been approached by the district to see if a database would be of interest - probably the one others have talked about, but the district is willing to pay the cost - seems like a no-brainer to me. At present we have the Thompson Gale product, infotrac,which includes CPI.Q (Canadian Periodicals), Student resource Center Gold, Gale Virtual Reference Library and Biography Resource Center. None of this is paid for at the school level. I thought that there was some sort of government funded database supplied to all bc schools, Is this it? The only database paid for at the school level is the Grolier's Encyclopedia on-line. Since I'm not presently working in the library, I really don't know what kind of use is being made of the resources, but I'd have to think long and hard before adding to what we have considering the cost of a new product might be in excess of $1,000 at the school level, that's a lot of books and videos that might get a lot more use. Also, its hard to determine what kind of overlap there might be in the different products, so one might be paying a lot of money for the same source materials under different names.
I've enjoyed reading Wayne's discussion posts and blogs, and he is absolutely on the money when he talks about giving students time, not rushing them when doing research or they will revert to googling. We all have experienced the frustrations of trying to locate the right sources through UBC library on-line, there is a steep learning curve, and what we need to be aware of is the design of the portal through which the students access information through the database; if we have difficulties using the search capabilities, you can bet that the students will. Small steps, including practice using the search capabilities, in fact modeling the process on projected screen image and having students pair up (Two heads are better than one) might help.