It's bad enough that one of the applicants for a vacancy on the Howell school board is a would-be book-burner. She also seems to think school employees are nothing more than "hired help" and that the way to help schools is to cut taxes.
Yes, I'm talking about Vicki Fyke, the founder of LOVE (Livingston Organization for Values in Education), whom the Livingston Press and Argus says in an article Friday (Oct. 5, 2007) has applied for the vacancy created by the resignation of Mary Jo Dymond.
The newspaper notes that Fyke "objected to profanity and sexual content in books assigned in an advanced English class at the high school." The books were not trash, but ones by Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Wright. And her complaint to U.S. Attorney Stephen J. Murphy III ended up absurdly triggering an FBI investigation.
But there's so much more (or less) to Fyke than that.
On a blog, The Suburban Voice, Fyke has written such gems as "Cutting taxes increases revenue" and referred to school employees as "the hired help."
And in an interview on WHMI radio March 2, Fyke complained that one of the English teachers isn't married and doesn't have any children so shouldn't be teaching books that have sexual references.
She's also pushed putting posters reading "In God We Trust" in school classrooms.
In another posting titled "You Worry Me," Fyke approvingly reprints a supposed letter from an airline pilot who says he's "worried" when he sees Arabs. "Read, absorb
and pass this on. This same concept can also be applied to other immigrant groups who
cross our borders. Hope you consider the intelligence of this pilot," wrote Fyke.
She worries me.
1 comment:
Love Group Not So Loving
Howell, MI: September 24, 2007: A right wing, religious-extremist group in this fast-growing, rural community of 10,000 continues its misguided invectives against its local school system. The Livingston Organization for Values in Education has become a transparent arm of the worst zealotry in national and local politics. The community, long-known for racist activity and subpopulations, had, many thought, turned a corner in acceptance and tolerance. But after the local school system’s Board of Education, representing 8000 public school students passed a diversity resolution in 2003, the so-called LOVE group began its pattern of hate, disrupting Board meetings and creating ill-found reputations for the district, its residents, its students, and its employees.
The school system (located equally in distance from the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, is State renowned for its exemplary schools, model programs, and excellent faculty and facilities…or at least it was until the hateful LOVE group surfaced.
Operating from core-values of homophobia, racism, and intolerance, the group took its hate campaign to other extremists, across the country via the web, orchestrating a pattern of hate-mail, erroneously claiming that tolerance and acceptance in the school’s diversity resolution were really advocacy and promotion of lifestyles. The District’s diversity resolution remains unchanged since 2003 (when it was enacted) and is posted in each of the district’s eleven schools.
Following a high school student-diversity club’s posting of a (clearly worded) diversity flag, the hateful LOVE group immediately cast the flag as a gay and lesbian banner, whipping local and state media into a coverage frenzy. The militant four or five core members of the group of 15 petitioned the Board to hang a cross-emblazoned Christian flag in the high school’s halls in celebration of a young Christian’s group. Both flags continue to be in use when members of the two clubs convene.
After a German church group, Voices of Heaven, disguising itself as a school exchange program, appeared in the District’s high school, LOVE group members complained that all of the group’s vocal music should have been Christian text. The District’s guidelines, in support of the United States Constitution, do not allow for the establishment of any one religion; school policies appropriately call for less than fifty percent religious music at school concerts.
The group created another firestorm in the community last winter when it claimed that Toni Morrison’s acclaimed Bluest Eye and Erin Gruwell’s Freedom Writers’ Diary constituted school-distribution of pornography. County prosecutors and State and national attorneys-general found no merit in the unloving and specious logic of the group’s angry, vitriolic leader Vicki Fyke. Local residents had enough and called for the Board of Education’s support of teachers and administrators. The loveless LOVE group countered with foundation-less calls for teacher-, board-member, and superintendent-resignations. A sensationalistic local press regularly extols the clash of local schools versus a small, vocal clan of hate-mongers who blog daily to discredit and misrepresent the school system.
LOVE is in the air in Howell, and the stench is fetid. Reasonable Board members have all but left the Board, sick to their stomachs with misguided LOVE-attempts to disrupt the district’s educational pursuits. At least one Board member, who home schools her children, is sickeningly tied to the nastiness of the LOVE group. Equally deranged peers wait to join her on the Board.
Teachers and administrators hold firm in keeping the public schools protected from faith-based initiatives, Bible-based curricula, fear-spreading censorship, and narrow limits for students’ consideration of life beyond Howell.
Howell is a community on the brink, but good and tolerant people see LOVE for what it is… a desperate assembly of right-wing extremists attempting to advance a vengeful politic without regard for the education of children. Even the town’s ministerial council wants nothing to do with the imbecilic members of this hate-filled group. The county’s largely Republican populace denies connections to the outlandish excesses of the outlier group.
Post a Comment