Is this any way to honor Charlie Kirk? | Opinion
While most of Wichita was busy Tuesday voting a sales tax into oblivion, you might have missed the Kansas Senate voting to punish school districts that aren’t aggressive enough in punishing students for criticizing ICE.
The budget amendment that passed the Senate on Tuesday doesn’t strip everyone of their rights to free speech, free assembly and to petition the government for redress of grievances — just kids under 18 who want to be heard outside their school walls during the business day, when they’re together and there are people around to hear them.
It’s the Senate’s answer to the school walkouts that have swept the nation recently. Students have been doing that to protest an increasingly authoritarian and paramilitary Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, that has been snatching kids like them out of schools and storing them in a dismal prison camp in the south Texas desert.
The amendment, by Republican state Sen. Michael Murphy of Sylvia, would set up a system of penalties for any public school district that:
(1) Experiences a student walkout and fails to obtain written parental consent for each absent student to leave the school building (Impossible).
(2) Fails to enforce school attendance laws and policies with associated disciplinary actions for such absent students (State senators are huge fans of local control of schools, except when they’re not).
(3) Has staff encourage, facilitate or enable such student walkout. (Not entirely sure what they mean by “facilitate or enable” in this context. Are teachers supposed to stand in the schoolhouse door like George Wallace, but this time to keep the protesting kids inside?)
School districts targeted by the amendment could be fined an amount equal to the base annual salary of the school superintendent for each day students walk out.
The average superintendent salary in Kansas is about $152,000. The league leaders are Blue Valley, $440,000; Kansas City, $342,000; and Wichita, $334,000.
The Senate envisions also stripping the districts of daily funding for the entire school day when a walkout occurs, although a lot of kids don’t participate at all and those who do usually do it for only an hour or so at the end of the day.
Private schools would be exempt from the law (they always are), so this wouldn’t interfere with them busing their students to the Capitol on school days to hold signs protesting abortions or demanding taxpayer-funded vouchers to pay for their Cadillac educations — a double standard I called out in a column last month.
Here’s another irony (I’m a big fan of irony): This is the same Senate that just two weeks ago passed Concurrent Resolution 1615, establishing Oct. 14 as “Charlie Kirk Free Speech Day” throughout Kansas.
Its stated purpose is to “provide an opportunity for all Kansans to reaffirm the importance of free speech and civil discourse.”
That, and “Be it further resolved: That we encourage Kansans to celebrate each Charlie Kirk Free Speech Day by exercising their freedom of speech and engaging in civil discourse to honor the memory of Charlie Kirk.”
I find myself looking forward to the next Oct. 14, when the conservative kids of Kansas want to leave class and honor Charlie during the school day.
What happens if their teachers don’t shut them down? What happens if they do?
I can hardly wait to find out.
