Polling officials allowed 17-year-old to vote Teenager now facing felony charges Eden Prairie, Minn. – September 28, 2006: Calling it the biggest thing he has ever done in his entire life, Jesse L. Hunter voted in the Minnesota primaries on Sept. 12. However, Hunter is unlike other voters casting their ballots this year. He is…
On Thursday, July 20, I held a public forum and press conference in downtown Asheville. My goal in doing so was to show the Buncombe County Board of Education how many people actually support having a student adviser on the school board. Members from the media included WLOS-TV, 570 AM WWNC, and Mountain Xpress. All…
USA Today, which is among the country’s most widely circulated publications, recently quoted NYRA’s Executive Director in an article on teen driving. Specifically, the article dealt with a report put out by the National Highway Safety Administration, which presented a biased, anti-youth interpretation of driving fatality statistics aimed at convincing states to make seventeen the…
Student representation is a concept the Buncombe County Board of Education does not seem to be able to grasp. Since February, I have written letters, delivered speeches and have called politicians at both the local and state levels of government about adding a nonvoting student adviser onto the local Board of Education. The student adviser…
There is a new bill pending in Congress that would cut government funding to any school or library that permits people under the age of 18 to access social networking websites such as Myspace. In addition, many schools are starting to punish students for pictures on their Myspace accounts. On May 22, reporters from ABC’s…
Adam King, of Asheville, North Carolina, spoke to the Buncombe County Board of Education about adding a student advisor for the third time on Thursday, June 1, 2006. Joel Burgess, of the Asheville Citizen-Times, was there covering this story and other stories taking place that night. After King had to sit through a two-hour meeting,…
The assault on MySpace is gaining traction. ABC News just covered the new policy at Libertyville High School in Illinois that would penalize students for content they’ve posted on their MySpace page. At the same time a bill in Congress called the Deleting Online Predators Act is increasingly getting attention. Those of us who care…
Somewhat related to the last post about the War on MySpace, now this is a case of schools using information posted on student’s websites and MySpace pages to punish them. The Chicago Tribune did a story on it, and asked for our comments. Excerpts: A north suburban school district could become one of the first…
NYRA members, drawn largely from the Orange County and Berkeley chapters, attended the California Democratic Party’s annual convention from April 28-30. NYRA hoped that the California Democratic Party would embrace NYRA’s voting age position as part of its platform. Many party leaders were supportive, however the platform committee was directly hostile to lowering the voting…
Well it was bound to happen. With all the media hysteria over MySpace, any student of our opportunistic elected officials should have known what was coming next. Congress has proposed a bill that would ban MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, and potentially all chatrooms, forums, blogs & Instant Messaging from school & library computers. More info here….
