Community schools provide students with "wraparound services" focusing on holistic approaches to educating children, a guest columnist writes
Nuria Martinez-Keel/Oklahoman Voice
From Betsy Combier: I agree that public schools are failing the children by not recognizing and providing for all the non-academic needs of these young minds, especially those with emotional and behavioral issues.
Why don't schools provide a safe haven for physical education, the arts, creative and critical thinking, life skills, etc (I can think of hundreds of extra-curricula interests) and hire a separate set of skilled providers who start at 3pm?
John
Thompson, Guest columnist, The Oklahoman, August 23, 2024
Oklahoma’s dismal bottom 10 rank in education outcomes
highlights a need to think differently about how we’re educating our children
who continue to struggle with academic performance, chronic absenteeism and
emotional and behavioral issues.
It’s time for our education leaders to take a hard look at the evidence-based benefits that
come from increased investments in the community school model.
Community schools provide students with “wraparound services.”
They focus on holistic approaches to educating children, understanding that for
a child to thrive in school an integrated support system is also needed for
their families at home. The model focuses on student and family engagement,
collaborative leadership, enriched learning opportunities and integrated
support systems.
With the election less than two weeks away, Judicial Watch is preparing to monitor Wisconsin polls and is setting up a National Election Fraud Report Line for voters to report voting issues as part of our ongoing election integrity efforts. Our trained observers will monitor polling sites in Wisconsin on November 5. Separately, Judicial Watch will run an Internet hotline for voters in all states to report suspicions of election and voter fraud.
We monitor elections to ensure compliance with state and federal laws. Judicial Watch’s election observers have monitored many state and national elections and have been certified and served as international election observers.
Robert Popper
Our lead election law attorney, Robert Popper, established Judicial Watch’s election monitoring program. Popper is a former deputy chief of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and a veteran poll observer for the Department of Justice.
The Election Integrity Hotline allows voters who witness any suspicious activity at their polling place, have issues with a voting machine, or witness voter fraud or intimidation to send a detailed email to Judicial Watch at ElectionLaw@JudicialWatch.org.
Our Judicial Watch election teams will monitor the election in Wisconsin to expose and deter any fraud, and our Election Hotline will expand our watchdog capability right down to the grass roots.
As you are probably aware, Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of our work, we assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii and cleaned up voter rolls across the country among other achievements.
Robert Popper, a Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads its election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.
The NVRA requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the official voter rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have died or changed residence. Among other things, the NVRA requires registrations to be cancelled when voters fail to respond to address confirmation notices and then fail to vote in the next two general federal elections. In 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed that such removals are mandatory (Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Inst., 138 S. Ct. 1833, 1841-42 (2018)).
In September, we argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit regarding a lower court ruling on Mississippi’s election law that permits absentee ballots to be received as late as five business days after Election Day.
In a similar lawsuit, in 2022, on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two other registered voters, we sued Illinois for allowing vote-by-mail ballots (even those without postmarks) to be counted if received up to 14 calendar days after Election Day if the ballots are dated on or before Election Day.
We filed our latest California lawsuit in May 2024 after uncovering a broad failure to clean up voter rolls in dozens of California counties. We sued California under the NVRA to force it to clean up its voter rolls. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Judicial Watch and the Libertarian Party of California, asks the court to compel California to make “a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls” as required by federal law.
In February 2023, Los Angeles County confirmed removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since the year before, under the terms of a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit we filed in 2017. (Legal pressure from Judicial Watch ultimately led to the removal of up to four million ineligible voters from voter rolls in New York, California, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, and elsewhere.)
In March 2024, on behalf of Breakthrough Ideas, Illinois Family Action, and Carol J. Davis, we sued Illinois officials under the NVRA to force them to clean the State’s voter rolls.
In December 2023, our attorneys sent a notice letter to election officials in the District of Columbia notifying them of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. The letter pointed out that D.C. publicly reported removing few or no ineligible voter registrations under a key provision of the NVRA. The letter threatened a federal lawsuit unless the violations were corrected in a timely fashion. In response to Judicial Watch’s inquiries, Washington, D.C. officials admitted that they had not complied with the NVRA, promptly removed 65,544 outdated names from the voting rolls, promised to remove 37,962 more, and designated another 73,522 registrations as “inactive.”
In July 2023 we filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, which struck down Maine’s policy restricting the use and distribution of the state’s voter registration list. According to a national study conducted by Judicial Watch in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate was 101% of eligible voters.
In July 2023 we also settled a federal election integrity lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Elections, and its director, which now grants access to the current centralized statewide list of registered voters for the state for the past 15 elections.
In April 2023, Pennsylvania settled with us and admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from Judicial Watch. The settlement commits Pennsylvania and five of its counties to extensive public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years.
In March 2023, Colorado agreed to settle our NVRA lawsuit alleging that Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its rolls. The settlement agreement requires Colorado to provide Judicial Watch with the most recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.
We also settled a federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps going forward to clean its voter registration lists.
Kentucky also removed hundreds of thousands of old registrations after it entered into a consent decree to end another of our Judicial Watch lawsuits.
In December 2023, our lawyers sent three other notice letters to election officials in the District of Columbia, California, and Illinois, notifying them of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. In response to Judicial Watch’s inquiries, Washington, D.C., officials admitted that they had not complied with the NVRA, promptly removed 65,544 outdated names from the voting rolls, promised to remove 37,962 more, and designated another 73,522 registrations as “inactive.”
In July 2023 we filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the decisionof the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, which struck down Maine’s policy restricting the use and distribution of the state’s voter registration list (Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Shenna Bellows (No. 23-1361). According to a national study we conducted in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate was 101% of eligible voters.
In July 2023, we also settled a federal election integrity lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Elections, and its director, which now grants access to the current centralized statewide list of registered voters for the state for the past 15 elections.
In April 2023, Pennsylvania settled with us and admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from Judicial Watch. The settlement commits Pennsylvania and five of its counties to extensive public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years.
In March 2023, we filed a federal lawsuit against the Illinois State Board of Elections and its Executive Director, Bernadette Matthews, over their failure to clean Illinois’ voter rolls and to produce election-related records as required by federal law.
Also in March 2023, Colorado agreed to settle a Judicial Watch NVRA lawsuit alleging that Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its rolls. The settlement agreement requires Colorado to provide us with the most recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.
In February 2022, we settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 inactive registrations from its voter rolls.
In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of Judicial Watch’s challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.
And, even after all this work, more is coming – as Judicial Watch increases its work to ensure free, fair, and honest elections!
Judicial Watch Sues to Force Clean Up of Oregon Voter Rolls—Lawsuit Alleges the State Has One of Worst Voting Lists in the Nation
Dirty voter rolls can mean dirty elections. Oregon has one of the dirtiest voting rolls in America and needs to clean them up ASAP! That’s why adding to our accomplishments listed above we filed our latest National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) lawsuit against the State of Oregon this week after uncovering a broad failure to clean up voter rolls in dozens of Oregon counties.
In July 2024, our attorneys sent a notice letter to the Oregon secretary of state on behalf of itself, the Constitution Party of Oregon and an Oregon registered voter, notifying them of evident violations of the National Voter Registration Act(NVRA) of 1993, based on their failure to remove ineligible voters from their registration rolls. The letter to Oregon serves as a “pre-suit” notice.
When Oregon claimed it was too expensive to comply with the mandates of the NVRA, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Constitution Party of Oregon and two lawfully registered voters of Umatilla County and Marion County, Oregon, against Lavonne Griffin-Valade in her official capacity as Oregon Secretary of State and the State of Oregon, to make “a reasonable effort to remove” the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls as required by federal law (Judicial Watch, et al. v. The State of Oregon et al. (No. 6:24-cv-01783)). The suit was filed to enforce basic voter list maintenance provisions under Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).
In our complaint, our lawyers argue that Oregon’s voter rolls contain large numbers of old, inactive registrations; and that 29 of Oregon’s 36 counties removed few or no registrations as required by federal election law. Our complaint asserts that Oregon and 35 of its counties had overall registration rates exceeding 100%; and that Oregon has the highest known inactive registration rate of any state in the nation. In combination, all of these facts show that Oregon is failing to remove inactive registrations pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) of the NVRA. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oregon, Eugene Division, to compel the defendants to comply with their voter list maintenance obligations under Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).
We are being assisted in our Oregon lawsuit by Stephen Joncus of Joncus Law PC in Happy Valley, Oregon.
Let’s hope Oregon does what it is supposed to do under law and start cleaning up its voting rolls!
Judicial Watch Sues for Records of Social Media Posts Critical of Donald Trump by Top FBI Agent Investigating Trump Assassination Attempt
When we discovered top FBI officials allegedly ordered an agent to scrub his Facebook page to delete anti-Trump vitriol before they would promote him to head the bureau’s Miami field office, we launched a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Justice Department to get to the bottom of this untoward effort to sanitize the bias of agents within the Bureau. The Biden-Harris FBI is engaged in a cover-up of a cover-up of one its top agent’s anti-Trump bias. This is why many Americans are concerned about the FBI’s dangerous political bias against Trump – and whether the FBI can be trusted to investigate the attempts on his life.
We filed a FOIA lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for messages among top leaders of the Federal Bureau of Investigation referencing social media posts of Special Agent Jeffrey Veltri, head of the Miami Field Office, which is investigating the September 15 assassination attempt against Donald Trump (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:24-cv-02740)).
We sued after the Department of Justice refused to respond in full to a November 21, 2023, FOIA request for:
1. All emails and Lync system messages sent to and from the following
2. FBI officials referencing social media posts and/or Facebook posts generated by Miami Field Office Special Agent Jeffrey Veltri: Director Christopher Wray, Deputy Director Paul Abbate, and/or Executive Assistant Director Jennifer Moore.
3. All communications, whether by email, text message, or the FBI Lync system between Director Wray, Dep. Director Abbate and/or EAD Jennifer Moore on the one hand and Miami FO Special Agent Veltri related to Donald Trump, social media posts, Facebook and/or political opinions.
Veltri was reportedly “one of several officials that used litmus tests to ‘purge’ political conservatives” like whistleblower Marcus Allen from the FBI. We have frequently sued the FBI when it refused to release requested documents.
In June 2024 we released documents showing that the FBI Office of Congressional Affairs provided a Democrat staffer with information on FBI whistleblowers who detailed the bureau’s targeting of political opponents and retaliation for their testifying at a May 18, 2023, hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
We also represented Marcus Allen, a decorated veteran, FBI analyst and witness before the Weaponization Subcommittee, in a lawsuit against FBI Director Christopher Wray for violating Allen’s constitutional rights by falsely accusing him of holding “conspiratorial views,” stripping his security clearance, and suspending him from duty without pay. On May 31, 2024, Allen’s security clearance was reinstated.
In January 2024, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense for reports submitted by a military officer to his superiors regarding an alleged conversation around January 2017 between CIA analysts Eric Ciaramella and Sean Misko about trying to “get rid” of then-President Trump.
In November 2023, we released FBI records showing top officials rushing to craft a public response to the leaked FBI intelligence memo that revealed its targeting of Catholics who adhere to traditional beliefs on church issues.
In June 2023, we sued for all FBI communications from bureau officials using several systems and databases regarding investigations carried out after an October 4, 2021, memo from Attorney General Merrick Garland instructing investigators to target American parents due to an alleged “increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public schools” In a March 21, 2023, report on the Garland memo, the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government cited FBI data which states that 25 inquiries under the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS” had been opened since the bureau began tracking the alleged incidents.
In September 2022, we filed a FOIA lawsuit for all records in the possession of FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten regarding an August 6, 2020, briefing provided to members of the U.S. Senate. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that raised concerns that the briefing was intended to undermine the senators’ investigation of Hunter Biden.
In May 2022, we announced a federal court ordered the FBI to disclose additional details about FBI and other officials “cc-ed” on the memo used to justify launching the “Crossfire Hurricane” spy operation against President Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign. Judge Carl J. Nichols had given the FBI until June 16, 2022, to respond. The order came in a September 2019 FOIA lawsuit our lawyers filed after the FBI failed to respond to a request for the memo, known as an “Electronic Communication” or “EC.”
In August 2020, we released 323 pages of emails between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page. The records include an email from Strzok to other FBI officials about Trump’s tweets regarding them spying on him, as well as their interaction with other media outlets including CNN.
In December 2019,we sued the Justice Department and CIA for communications between Ciaramella and former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI Attorney Lisa Page, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and/or the Special Counsel’s Office. In both cases the government refused to produce records, “refusing to confirm or deny the existence or non-existence of responsive records” because “confirming or denying the existence or non-existence of responsive records would reveal information protected by the CIA Act, namely the existence or non-existence of an employment relationship between the Agency and Mr. Ciaramella.” And, the government claimed, it would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
The FBI, despite being a storied law enforcement agency, has an awful record of corruption and cover-up. Judicial Watch’s litigation to hold the FBI accountable under the law is – quite simply – essential!
Judicial Watch Sues for Records on Kamala Harris Secret Service Motorcade Accident
The Biden-Harris Secret Service is in a dangerous tailspin and literally can’t drive straight. And rather than be forthcoming about these issues with the American people, the Secret Service is engaged is a series of mounting and unlawful cover-ups, going back at least to a 2022 car accident by Kamala Harris’ Secret Service driver, which the agency initially – and falsely – dismissed as “mechanical failure.”
We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for records on a 2022 car accident involving Vice President Kamala Harris’s Secret Service motorcade (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security(No. 1:24-cv-02752)).
The suit was filed after the agency failed to respond to a July 19, 2024, our FOIA request for:
1. Any and all emails and text messages sent to and from members of the Vice-Presidential Protection Division regarding the October 3, 2022, accident involving the vehicle carrying Vice President Kamala Harris and/or the driving skills/abilities of the agent driving the vehicle at the time of the accident.
2. All waivers for defensive driver classes granted to USSS special agents involved in vehicular accidents with official vehicles.
3. Records reflecting directives for USSS special agents to undergo defensive driver classes as a result of being involved in accidents with official vehicles.
The New York Postreported in October 2022 that “Vice President Kamala Harris was involved in a minor car accident Monday, one that was initially — and falsely — dismissed as ‘mechanical failure.’” The driver of her SUV struck a curb hard enough “that the tire needed to be replaced, bringing the VP’s motorcade to a standstill.” NBC reported that the vehicle had been partially airborne.
In my new book, Rights and Freedoms in Peril, I detail some of Judicial Watch’s numerous lawsuits and disclosures about Secret Service controversies.
In addition, on September 3, 2024, following up on reports that the Biden Secret Service denied President Trump’s requests for additional Secret Service protection, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for all Secret Service and other records regarding potential increased protective services to former President Trump’s security detail prior to the attempt on his life at his July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security(No. 1:24-cv-02495)).
On August 23, we received USSS records that show the Secret Service has made it a top priority that “diversity and inclusion is not just ‘talked about’ – but demonstrated by all employees through ‘Every Action, Every Day.’” [Emphasis in original] The records show the Secret Service, demands that 12 percent of its workforce be composed of “persons with disabilities,” and that it is the policy of the Secret Service to provide equal employment opportunity without regard to such non-merit factors as “disability (physical or mental).”
