Parents Revolt

The kindergarten parents of Mountain View and Condit are going to send their kids to school tomorrow wearing their Thanksgiving costumes. And it is likely that many of them will keep their kids out of school on Wednesday to deprive the Claremont Unified School District of Wednesday's coveted ADA (Average Daily Attendance) money from the State.

Mountain View kindergarten mother Dena Murphy got another half hour on KFI's John and Ken drive-time radio show (640 on your AM dial). To put it charitably, the shock-jock hosts are not sympathetic to Michelle Raheja's idea to keep the kindergartener's from wearing their construction paper and white paste Indian and Pilgrim costumes. We have covered this earlier, here, here, and here.

Raheja is an Assistant Professor of English at UC Riverside and the mother of a Condit Elementary kindergartener. UCR also hosts the California Center for Native Nations which, among other projects, seems to advocate removing the image of that old Indian fighter, Old Hickory, Andrew Jackson, from the $20 bill. This seems of a piece with Raheja's "history-defying" (that's a word from this website page) campaign to remove the Indians and Pilgrims from Thanksgiving. Why, next thing you know, they're going to want take the "X" out of Xmas.

We now can link to the audio stream of the four o'clock hour. The Claremont issue takes up the first 40 minutes or so of the 60 minute clip. (This link may change when the audio goes to the KFI on-demand page; we'll try to keep it current.) John and Ken have posted a poll that at this writing is running 25 to 1 in favor of the parents. A few minutes ago, when we captured the screenshot, it was 99 to 1.


John and Ken also recapped this issue at the top of the six o'clock hour--the link is here. They wonder whether the kids will have their feathers confiscated. The riff begins about 30 seconds into the clip.

The event goes down tomorrow morning (Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008). The kids are scheduled to leave Mountain View at 9 a.m. and march up Mountain Avenue to Condit. The parents send their kids to school at 8 and the principals have an hour to sort things out before the march is to begin. There is sure to be a lot of confusion. Be there.

Map of Mountain View and Condit Elementary Schools
click on image to enlarge