Eagle Forum | May 2013
Data from a drug-testing lab and police reports show that marijuana use among teenagers and children has greatly increased since passage of Colorado Amendment 64, which legalized the drug for adult recreational use. Not just more teenagers are using marijuana, but they are using more of it, resulting in an increased and longer “high.” According to a Denver news station, recent studies show that marijuana doubles the risk of a car accident. Research also shows it to cause lasting and irreversible harm to adolescents’ “intelligence, attention, and memory.” (CBS, 03-06-13 and PNAS.org, 08-27-12)
A school principal in Michigan called toy World War II soldiers on a child’s birthday cupcakes “insensitive,” in light of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary school. Even after public scrutiny, the principal stood by her decision, saying in a press release that the decorations were disallowed in order to create “a safe place for [children] to learn, grow, and have respectful dialogues about their differences.” The 3rd-grader’s father said, “I think it is disgusting … that they’re lumping [soldiers] together with sociopaths that shoot children.” (Washington Times, 03-11-12)
Steven Hayward, formerly of the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, is the first to fill the position of Visiting Scholar of Conservative Thought at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In response to the position created with $1 million in donations, Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars, said, “What is needed, rather than an attempt to balance left and right politics, is a depoliticized academy in which scholars and students pursue the truth wherever it may lead.”
During the 2009-10 school year, the most recent data the Dept. of Education provides, 4.7 million, or 10% of American students, were English language learners. More than 2/3rds of these students were born in the U.S. (AP, 04-14-13).