None Dare Call It Truancy

Coming soon to a school district near you: school-sanctioned hooky.

Yup, “progressives” in Fairfax County have decided their school division should become the first in the nation to give students in 7th through 12th grades excused absences to attend sit-ins and protest marches.

This is just the beginning, of course. Once you give pubescent protestors one day off per year they’ll want two. After all, how can you usher in a great new socialist utopia with just one day a year?

No, this is not a non-political measure. Don’t believe it when Fairfax educators say it is. The policy grew out of the actions of the kids at Parkland High School in Florida who became media darlings with their gun control message after the mass shooting at their schools. They called for the National School Walkouts in March of 2018 and, ever since, some school officials have been trying to figure out how to let kids participate in such protests instead of going to class.

If conservative kids had been stomping their feet and demanding the schools sanction their attendance at the annual March for Life, it’s doubtful anyone would have paid attention let alone change school attendance policy. (As it happens, this policy goes into effect Jan. 27th. Four days after this year’s massive anti-abortion march in Washington.)

According to The Washington Post, the skip-school measure was introduced by Fairfax School Board member Ryan McElveen, a Brookings Institution employee who once worked with the Clinton Foundation and who’s described as a strong supporter of Virginia’s Green New Deal.

“I think we're setting the stage for the rest of the nation with this,” McElveen boasted to The Post. “It's a dawning of a new day in student activism, and school systems everywhere are going to have to be responsive to it.”

Hold on one minute, Mr. McElveen. Schools HAVE to be responsive to student activism? When did that become part of the curriculum?

I thought schools were supposed to educate kids. Period. If students want to skip school to slap on a vagina hat or a ski mask and carry a placard in the streets, they should be willing to take the consequences of an unexcused absence. You know, zeroes for work not turned in. Zeroes on missed tests. That sort of thing.

Then again, who really cares about grades when many kids believe they’ll be dead in 12 years?

Oakton High School senior Wendy Gao, 18, leads several groups that fight climate change and has missed five days of school in recent months to participate in activism. She told the (Washington) Post she hopes the new policy will increase the number of students who attend climate strikes.

“Skipping school and business as usual is to show that there's no point in going to school if we are having our future taken away from us,” she said. “There's not a point to our education if we're not going to be alive in 10 years, 20 years, the end of the century.”

Frankly, the left should be ashamed of itself for filling young heads with this sort of insane fear-mongering claptrap. These kids are going to be alive in 10 or 20 years, unless they start vaping and contract a deadly respiratory disease. Not only that, but they’ll be living in one of the cleanest, most prosperous countries on earth.

This is just more zaniness coming from the left. Like that brainwashed child from Sweden who has called on school kids across the world to follow her in walking out of classes on Fridays to join in global protests over climate change.

Even some experts told the Post that skipping school to attend protests favors liberal causes:

“Kids on the right who are active, they tend to be doing it by preparing to run for school board, or being aides in legislature,” said Meira Levinson, a Harvard University professor who studies education.

“People who call themselves conservatives probably do still count respecting authority — staying in school — as a crucial and central tenet of the social order,” said Thai Jones, a lecturer at Columbia University who studies radical social movements.

Look, I’m a supporter of free speech and free assembly. People have a right to engage in non-violent protests. And kids, with their parents’ permission, have a right to attend.

But I do have one question: Why aren’t student protests ever scheduled for weekends?