The Dom Giordano Program
Readin' Writin' and Reason | October 12, 2024
Dom Giordano, WPHT host and former teacher, has dedicated much of his daily show toward parents who are taking it into their own hands to push back against school boards that have a negative impact on their children. This has culminated in a weekly podcast on education, Readin', Writin', and Reason, which has allowed wonderful relationships to develop between Giordano, educators, and parents throughout the country who are speaking out against overbearing school boards.
- Broadcast on:
- 12 Oct 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
[MUSIC PLAYING] Now at T-Mobile, get four 5G phones on us and four lines for $25 a line per month when you switch with eligible trade-ins, all on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of four lines for $25 per line per month without a paid discount using debit or bank account, $5 more per line without auto pay plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge. Phones would be a 24-monthly bill credit for well qualified customers, contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement too. No credit to end if you pay off devices early, ctmobile.com. Today's program has been pre-recorded. Now a special talk radio 1210 WPHT presentation. It's reading, writing, and reason. Now here's your host, Dom Gerdano. Hey, welcome into reading, writing, and reason with Dom Gerdano, Dan, and Henry producing. And this week, we have a big guest. We have Randall Wagner. He is from, and a lawyer from the Independence Law Center. He's involved. He's going to break down what the heck happened in the Emory H. Markle Middle School in Hanover, Pennsylvania. It is the Southwestern school district where the school installed windows in two gender inclusive bathrooms. The bathroom stalls remain private, but the windows allow those standing or walking in the hallway to see inside the bathroom. Now all this, you're thinking what, Dom, this is not some reading, writing, and reason. Well, it is all this part of the contention on so-called gender inclusive bathrooms. So the school district was wrong. I think you're going to hear the education lawyers say this was a violation of privacy, but he understands sort of this turmoil that's going on in school districts. We had again, this week here locally, the Central Buck School District, they are in the process of getting rid of their policy that they deemed controversial. The policy which went into effect last year with the outgoing school board was to say that you play the sports that is your biological sex at birth. How's that controversial? What's controversial is putting in someone who's gender fluid or transgender or whatever term they'd like to use to play against girls. And when you bring up Title IX, the wonders of women's sports, why would we risk it by doing this? Well, because of agenda, that's why. Watch for that in the Central Buck School District. And we'll have more, we have a special guest, we have the attorney coming on from the Independence Law Center in our second segment today on reading, writing, and reason to tell us about these surveillance windows and how all this went awry. Well, one of the things that's gone awry in America's schools, and one of the mantras of this show, of this podcast, reading, writing, and reason, it is about parental rights. We believe in parental rights. That's holy here. And a lot of people don't respect that. In Michigan, the Michigan Supreme Court this week denies an appeal of a parent seeking school documents. The Supreme Court there said Michigan parents can't request some school curricula under public record acts. The state's top court said that this Rochester, Michigan parent who requested the curriculum for a class held in a Rochester public school was unable to do that. That's what they ruled. It was materials for a high school class titled A History of Ethnic and Gender Studies. The district argued the law did not require to provide records held by teachers. But the parent said, just as I'm saying, what about parental rights to see what went into a course like this, why couldn't they be accommodated? Well, this is ongoing. But again, does it seem unreasonable this parental request to see the curricula that was involved in what appears to be a pretty controversial course? I would say no, but we're going to see this play out again and again and again. You're going to see battles over that coming up across the country. Something that is coming up in many places too is a very difficult situation in schools. It's a Reuters survey headline, an American education classrooms reshaped by record migrant arrivals. They say the arrival of more than half a million school age children since 2022. I think it's more than that has strained school budgets and left educators grappling with language barriers. You have kids coming here speaking Spanish or any number of other languages. And the date line on this or the place they went to first for this Reuters survey was Charlotte Roy, Pennsylvania. Remember the guests that we had on there? I believe out of the 60 kids in their kindergarten class in this small town, 45 of them did not speak English. I believe they're Haitian. And again, this puts an incredible strain on a school district, both the budget, but then the language barriers, the cultural barriers, they're not equipped to handle and influx like this, particularly a small town like this. So what is the lesson? Well, we can't have this staggering migration, many times illegal, even and/or people that are coming here under some special guidance from the federal government. If they're plopped down, even in a place like New York, it's difficult. Let alone Charlotte Roy or Springfield, Ohio. And this Reuters story talks in great detail about the staggering numbers, the money, the overcrowding, and then the language barriers. I have one story to end on to. High school officials in a school district around this issue of girl sports with somebody who's transgendered playing here, it's the Bowe High School in Bowe, New Hampshire. Parents of students at Bowe High School complained to the school's athletic director after they were told their girl's soccer team would play against an opponent with a biological male on its team. Officials told the parents nothing could be done to prevent it because of a ruling by a federal judge. So what happened is some of the parents decided to show their support for biological females by wearing pink wristbands with XX on them, get it? And as a result of that, they were banned, one parent complaining, my daughter's playing in the homecoming game this weekend and I'm banned until the 23rd. I can't even be there for her homecoming game. The moral of the story is you're gonna see more and more of this battle going on nationwide. And I think the only thing that will change it in another direction is if the Trump campaign wins, they're on record, they will change these things. If they don't, I think the Harris administration will continue with them, they see it differently and they will say the Department of Education, et cetera, should continue to go down the path that we're on right now. You'll see more and more of it nationally at the college level. You're seeing all kinds of volleyball teams who will not play a team. Utah State was the most recent that apparently has a biological male at some level in college, volleyball, which can be very dangerous, spiking the ball, et cetera. You get somebody who is good, bigger, stronger, all that, that could be a problem. All right, so that's the story this week around reading, writing, and reason and some of these big issues that are happening in schools. Coming up though, special guests, we're gonna talk with Randall Wegner from the Independence Law Center. They're kind of an offshoot of the Family Institute in Pennsylvania. How did a school district put in surveillance windows, in gender inclusive bathrooms, just gender inclusive, and then they said they were given that guidance by the Independence Law Center. They deny it, they're gonna lay out why. That's coming up here on reading, writing, and reading. ♪ It's better over here ♪ AT&T customers, switching to T-Mobile has never been easier. We'll pay off your existing phone and give you a new one free, all on America's largest 5G network. Visit tmobile.com/carrierfreedom to switch today. (upbeat music) Pay off up to $650 via virtual prepaid master card in 15 days, free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax, qualifying, port, and trade and service on Go 5G next to credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits to credit, stop, and balance and required finance agreement as do. Peace. ♪ I'm gonna teach ya ♪ Hey, welcome in to reading, writing, a reason with Dom Giorgano. The Independence Law Center has been around for a while in the Family Institute. They are conservative outfits. And a school district that shockingly this week, it became known had put in surveillance windows in gender inclusive classrooms, said that they were advised to do that by the Independence Law Center. Here's what Randall Wegnerp from the Independence Law Center told me about that. He denied that, and he laid out the case against the surveillance windows. Randy, welcome to Philadelphia. Thanks for joining us again. Hey, thanks for having me. So, where do we get this story, this crazy school district? You can salt it with them on what, how to deal with the gender inclusive directives? Well, we help a lot of school districts with a lot of issues, including bathroom and locker room privacy, girls sports issues, parental rights, pronoun issues. So, we have represented the school. And really, the advice that we give to all schools is more privacy, the better. And there's good ways to create privacy. You want complete privacy from the opposite sex. And so, we always say that the privacy of a restroom starts at the door of the restroom. It's not, it doesn't start at the door of the stall, 'cause the stall is just there for the minimal privacy you expect from someone of the same sex. Not what you want from the sounds, from the sight looking in at stalls. That doesn't give you any privacy from the opposite sex. Why did the Southwestern school district have to do this, Randy? Because, you know, we have on the Moms for Liberty and others, they had that big lawsuit, et cetera. Did they try to resist the gender, so-called gender inclusive? Well, this is a school board coming after another school board. And so, there was another school board with a policy that set up gender inclusive restrooms in some of their schools. But, you know, sometimes you have a school that follows advice, and sometimes you have a school that doesn't, and so, the right way for a school to deal with privacy is if they've got a multi-user facility and one person of the opposite sex in those spaces, you get rid of the multi-user facility, and what you create is a bank of single user. Just like you'd have at a coffee shop, if you're walking in a coffee shop, and there's a door, and people both sexes can use it, but just one at a time with full floor to ceiling. - They said- - They're the right way to do it. - Yeah, the school board said they put this in to prevent vaping, drug use, bullying, or cutting class, but then no such windows were placed in any of the other bathrooms. I mean, I'm astounded. There's gotta be more of a back story here, Randy, to think that people are gonna say, well, you know, we may oppose what's going on here, but various groups shoving this type of bathroom situation, but you can't put in surveillance windows. - Well, and what's really interesting, what this situation has pulled out is really interesting because we've been fighting for privacy issues for years. We've sued schools and representing students, and we've represented schools, and oftentimes we'll hear progressive groups saying, well, you know, it really doesn't matter. You can have a boy who identifies as a girl using the space with a girl. This is all fine. And suddenly everybody's agreeing, and this part is refreshing, that folks are saying, wait a second. People shouldn't be overhearing you when you're using the bathroom. People shouldn't be seeing you. So I think there's something very valuable that's coming out of this when progressive groups are finally admitting what we all know. - Yes, that's exactly why I see, in addition to the, in my words, a buffoonery of the school board, the silver lining is it underlines, and what you said, if doable, I mean, how many students are you gonna have? I don't know if you guys have any statistics on that. I think it's often fairly rare, even though it's trending toward not being, that say they are gender fluid and/or they are transgender, they could be accommodated by some single use one person at a time bathrooms. - And you know what, we find that a lot of students, regardless of whether they identify with the opposite sex or if they identify as their sex, they like single use their facilities. There's a privacy that's afforded there that's just awfully nice. And so I think increasingly you're gonna have school, school's recognizing, particularly with the new construction, that let's just do this the right way, and we're not gonna have to deal with problems. - To that point, Randy, that you had. - Yeah, just a curiosity too. I know that by the time I had stopped teaching and got into this, it wasn't, it was a year or two after that, a little bit more. Many school districts now have abandoned showering, even after sports or whatever, because we're living in an era where people have a lot of difficulty with that, back to the single use thing, even though society would say we're freer, kids don't wanna do that. They store stuff in these shower rooms or something of that. - How does that, but you don't? - Yeah, you know, you use the shower rooms, you just store stuff there. - Yeah, exactly. - And we're hearing that increasingly with schools, and when we've suggested single user options, schools have said, "You know what? "I think kids will use them more in situations like that." And so there's ways to do it, where you can afford everybody 100% privacy, like you would in your own home. And so my hope out of a story like this is that we can build a greater consensus of the right way to do things, that privacy really matters. And moving forward, we can think outside the box and do it right, 'cause, you know, even when we talk to architects, they get confused when we start talking about, like, how would you do this in a school and do it right where everyone is afforded privacy? There's a little bit of a learning curve, and then we get back to the basics of, "Oh, yeah." And then everybody can be comfortable, 'cause you can have the privacy that everybody has wanted all along. And it's funny, 'cause sex actually matters. So we spent the last decade trying to pretend that sex doesn't matter, but it does. - It does. - It really does. It matters to something like this. It matters in sports. And it matters, a lot of us, just in terms of how we go about daily life, is somebody going to force us to use a pronoun that we feel like is a lie. And what are we gonna do in society where we can, we need to learn how to respect everyone, and we need to learn how to do that in a way that's respectful, that isn't forcing other people to just buy our ideology, buy our way of thinking. - Exactly. - It's pluralistic, and we need to learn how to live with each other. - Randy, thank you very much. Independence Law Center, as always. Thank you, Randy. - Hey, thank you. All right, that is our guest this week from the Independence Law Center. Each week, we bring you the very best parental rights, the cost of schools, trends in parenting, and all that, wherever you get your podcasts, or on Talk Radio 12 Tech. Tell people about it, please. Particularly in this election cycle, there's a lot of big issues right here on reading, writing, and reasoning. ♪ You need a lesson gonna bring it to you now ♪ ♪ You spend it over here ♪ AT&T customers, switching to T-Mobile has never been easier. We'll pay off your existing phone and give you a new one free, all on America's largest 5G network. Visit T-Mobile.com/carrierfreedom to switch today. Pay off up to $650 via virtual prepaid master card in 15 days, free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax, qualifying port and trade and service on Go 5G next to credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits to credit, stop, and balance and require finance agreements, too.