W.a.r. By Jeff Wilson (Jkwsquirrel)

[wenmale64]

Going nuclear seldom works out for the better, but in the case of Joey and Jack, I think it may be the only option that will really bring these actions to light. Now in a church owned community, which is how Denora seems to be, truth in actions are seldom held in the real light.  I agree that Billy, most likely, will not take this path..... Now if Brett gets the full story, WATCH OUT!!!

@Freerider  You have not offended me as everybody has the right to their own feelings and beliefs. I am a bit like  @Israfil in this matter.  I simply do not see how you can even consider Joey shoving his dick in Billys face to not be sexual assult. Yes, Billy is gay, but unencouraged actions like that are assult in my book. It is like was said above: divorcing the punch from assult and battery is impossible.

  To be fair, I simply hate bullys and want the ground scrubbed with their carcases  .

 

Keep up the debate. It makes the story much more interesting as it may bring up views to consider  .

[Freerider]

4 hours ago, Israfil said:

 

Well, the story is a little dark at times so it’s to be expected.  Though I’m honestly still curious (as are others, I suspect) on what you meant in your comment about the assault - saying the sexual aspect of sexual assault isn’t important is like saying the part where a guy got punched isn’t the important part of assault and battery.  

 

My guess is you mean that we should focus on what one means in an assault as opposed to the actions themselves, then I’m afraid you can’t quite divorce the two.  Regardless of what an assailant is thinking, their actions remain the same.

 

Or I’m way off base in which case enlighten me.  I’m not trying to continue the argument so much as understand  

 

 

I'll be happy to explain my views on this, but this is a topic about the story. It is different from your assumption though.

 

[Freerider]

I did not really expect to have offended anybody, but the opportunity to apologise if was too good to pass on

 

Ok, I'll try to explain as short as possible.

My beef is with grading bad deeds on details. Why is a sexual assault any worse than a "normal" assault? An assault is bad, period. I highly doubt the victim of the latter is any better off than the victim of the first. Your comment implied (to me) that it would not have been that bad as long as Joey would have keept his penis in his pants. You focussed so much on the fact that this was not "just" an assault, but a SEXUAL assault. I strongly oppose this kind of thinking. 

 

There is more to this, but that is it in a nutshell. 

 

[wenmale64]

@Freerider  I understand your point and agree somewhat. However when you add a blatant sexual component to the action it is indeed worse than simple assult. With this in mind it becomes more heinous. I, in no way, am minimizing the seriousness of any type of assult.  I just feel that any assult of a openly sexual nature rises to a higher level.  As an example, a punch to face is a higher level of assult than someone poking you in the chest with a finger.  Both are an assult, one just has higher ramifications.  Lets keep up the conversations/debates as they open the book for myself and others to take a look at things from a different vantage point.  Onward to the next chapter  .

[jkwsquirrel]

The new chapter is up! Enjoy!

[jkwsquirrel]

 

[jkwsquirrel]

 

[jkwsquirrel]

The new chapter "Eighteen and Life" is up.  It'll explain what these videos are about.  Enjoy! 

[jkwsquirrel]

New chapter is up.  It's a short one this week, but a necessary piece of the puzzle as we begin removing Billy's security blanket.

[glennish]

I have to say the coin collection was a bit disappointing.   I was hoping that after George's comment in the cabin at the end of retaliation that there might be something hidden in there with about 5 zeros after it. 

 

Oh Well...................

[Shadow086]

I thought there was going to be a hidden gay porn collection in there.

[Shadow086]

It'll be interesting to see how far they go to get Billy and Joey out of the running for valedictorian.

 

What I think will happen is that Carl and Fuckface Taylor will become so confident that they'll start making mistakes.  I can see them setting themselves up for a discrimination lawsuit with the way they treat Billy and the other members of the LGBT alliance.  It would be kind of funny if Jack McKenzie of all people sued the school district on Billy's behalf (to get Sarah disqualified and put Joey in the lead, of course).

[Former Member]

18 minutes ago, Shadow086 said:

It'll be interesting to see how far they go to get Billy and Joey out of the running for valedictorian.

 

What I think will happen is that Carl and Fuckface Taylor will become so confident that they'll start making mistakes.  I can see them setting themselves up for a discrimination lawsuit with the way they treat Billy and the other members of the LGBT alliance.  It would be kind of funny if Jack McKenzie of all people sued the school district on Billy's behalf (to get Sarah disqualified and put Joey in the lead, of course).

But not all states have laws that would allow such legal action. In many US states it is still legal to fire someone for being LGBTQ. Landlords can legally refuse to rent to you if you are LGBTQ in many parts of the US. And many US states do not protect the rights of LGBTQ students!  :-(

[Former Member]

Another strategy might be to alert Stanford University to the grade ‘adjustment’ forced on Miss Winston by the school board.  ;-)

 

Stanford would take allegations like that very seriously!  ;-)

[Shadow086]

I'm not sure how the US school system works, but wouldn't there be somewhere they could file a complaint against the trustees?

 

Not like they're going to do any of that, they'll just let them get away with it because they don't think they can do anything.

[Former Member]

1 minute ago, Shadow086 said:

I'm not sure how the US school system works, but wouldn't there be somewhere they could file a complaint against the trustees?

 

Not like they're going to do any of that, they'll just let them get away with it because they don't think they can do anything.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education appears to be the agency to contact, although Pennsylvania also has an additional layer between the local school districts and the state: Pennsylvania Intermediate Units, the purpose of which eludes me.

 

Hawaii has a single public school district that serves the entire state. California’s system is structurally somewhere between those two, but is incredibly byzantine in its complexity in how individual districts are funded. The educational system of each of the 50 states, DC, and the US territories is set up very differently.

[jkwsquirrel]

In Pennsylvania, almost every school district has its own set of schools (elementary and high schools), it's own board, and its own set of principals for each of the schools.  It's a very localized system, a Republican conservative's dream, really.  Every school board is elected in public elections, usually those off-year elections that no one shows up for.  The school boards have a lot of power within the district, mainly in hiring.  You'll see a lot of the same last names on school boards and on the faculty and staff of the school, if you know what I mean.  Lots of favors, lots of nepotism, lots of politics.  If you don't have the right last name, you're out of luck.  That was kind of what I was hoping to capture in the last chapter and in the chapters to come.  It's small town politics that Billy has only dealt with from a distance until now.  Now he's ruffling feathers and getting in the way, so he'll be dealing with the consequences more directly.  But this stuff has been part of the undercurrent of the story all along.

 

What I want to capture in Commencement is the idea of what parents want for their children and what those children want for themselves are often in conflict with each other.  As the kids have grown up, they've matured from the what their parents expected them to be into their own people.  Sarah and Joey  were expected to be the perfect angels who got good grades and would allow their parents to bask in the glory of their achievements.  Their parents were willing to cover up their sins in order to preserve their own reputation and pride.  Both kids rebelled through the one thing their parents couldn't control, sex.  The McKenzies had done a good job of keeping Joey's anti-social behavior under wraps until Billy exposed the abortion scandal.  John Taylor thought he could just easily brush Sarah's pregnancy and abortion under the rug, but Miss Winston wasn't willing to play along.  You could go through each of the kids and find the same thing, the parents want one thing, the kids want to be their own person, and conflict ensues.  (Think of Linkin Park's "Numb" and Good Charlotte's "The Anthem.")

Edited January 26, 2018 by jkwsquirrel

[Shadow086]

1 minute ago, jkwsquirrel said:

You could go through each of the kids and find the same thing, the parents want one thing, the kids want to be their own person, and conflict ensues. 

Like a mother wanting a good Christian son, and the son deciding to bring his relationship with his boyfriend out in the open during church, for example?

[jkwsquirrel]

Just now, Shadow086 said:

Like a mother wanting a good Christian son, and the son deciding to bring his relationship with his boyfriend out in the open during church, for example?

Exactly!

[Former Member]

4 hours ago, jkwsquirrel said:

In Pennsylvania, almost every school district has its own set of schools (elementary and high schools), it's own board, and its own set of principals for each of the schools.  It's a very localized system, a Republican conservative's dream, really.  Every school board is elected in public elections, usually those off-year elections that no one shows up for.  The school boards have a lot of power within the district, mainly in hiring.  You'll see a lot of the same last names on school boards and on the faculty and staff of the school, if you know what I mean.  Lots of favors, lots of nepotism, lots of politics.  If you don't have the right last name, you're out of luck. 

It’s not so different in California. Some school districts have odd borders compared with the cities they serve since the school districts were drawn first and the cities grew later. The city of San José appears to have half a dozen school districts within and overlapping its borders due to the area’s agricultural roots and the physical expansion of the city over the years. On the other hand fiscal mismanagement by several school districts in my part of my current county forced state takeover and they were merged into a larger, hopefully more efficient single unified district.  ;-)

 

When I lived in a growing suburban city, the area was served by three different districts and a one-room schoolhouse; the parents in the older, more established city decided that didn’t want to ‘subsidize’ their neighbors and forced a realignment into two unified school districts that conformed to the city borders (with the one-room schoolhouse remaining separate, but still feeding into the high school); this forced the new districts to negotiate to allow students from the ‘wealthier’ district to attend classes in the ‘poor’ district until they could build new schools; I thought it would have been more efficient to merge the two elementary school districts into the single high school district, but that option was not on the ballot!  ;-)

 

In a wealthier part of my county, some parents are attempting to split off a handful of schools in a large school district. Critics rightly point out that they’re trying to isolate themselves from students from less wealthy neighborhoods. Many parents fail to see the benefits of students from differing backgrounds and economic conditions interacting on a daily basis.

Edited January 26, 2018 by Former Member

[jkwsquirrel]

8 hours ago, droughtquake said:

It’s not so different in California. Some school districts have odd borders compared with the cities they serve since the school districts were drawn first and the cities grew later. The city of San José appears to have half a dozen school districts within and overlapping its borders due to the area’s agricultural roots and the physical expansion of the city over the years. On the other hand fiscal mismanagement by several school districts in my part of my current county forced state takeover and they were merged into a larger, hopefully more efficient single unified district.  ;-)

 

When I lived in a growing suburban city, the area was served by three different districts and a one-room schoolhouse; the parents in the older, more established city decided that didn’t want to ‘subsidize’ their neighbors and forced a realignment into two unified school districts that conformed to the city borders (with the one-room schoolhouse remaining separate, but still feeding into the high school); this forced the new districts to negotiate to allow students from the ‘wealthier’ district to attend classes in the ‘poor’ district until they could build new schools; I thought it would have been more efficient to merge the two elementary school districts into the single high school district, but that option was not on the ballot!  ;-)

 

In a wealthier part of my county, some parents are attempting to split off a handful of schools in a large school district. Critics rightly point out that they’re trying to isolate themselves from students from less wealthy neighborhoods. Many parents fail to see the benefits of students from differing backgrounds and economic conditions interacting on a daily basis.

We have what I like to call "donut districts" around here.  What happens is the city itself has a school district within the city limits.  So the suburbs form a school district around the city, leaving a hole in the middle for the city kids.  It's all legal because the school district lines are based off the township and city lines.  Of course, you know how it goes, the city kids get garbage and the suburb kids have all the breaks because that's where the money is.

[Former Member]

3 minutes ago, jkwsquirrel said:

We have what I like to call "donut districts" around here.  What happens is the city itself has a school district within the city limits.  So the suburbs form a school district around the city, leaving a hole in the middle for the city kids.  It's all legal because the school district lines are based off the township and city lines.  Of course, you know how it goes, the city kids get garbage and the suburb kids have all the breaks because that's where the money is.

Because of geography and history, things are not quite so tidy here. Oakland and the school district I live in have very expensive homes in the hills with lovely Bay views that also overlook the much less wealthy flatlands that are much more diverse ethnically. Oakland and San Francisco have a handful of academically high achieving schools along with struggling schools with very low graduation and achievement rates. (Tom Hanks attended Oakland’s Skyline High School, one of the high achieving schools.)

 

Completely surrounded by Oakland is the separate and independent city of Piedmont. Piedmont has its own school district as well as police and fire departments. Piedmont High School’s annual Bird Calling Contest used to be featured on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and The Late Show with David Letterman. Piedmont has always thought of itself as much more exclusive and prestigious than Oakland. Oakland’s see Piedmonters as snobby.  ;-)

[jkwsquirrel]

10 hours ago, droughtquake said:

Oakland’s see Piedmonters as snobby.  ;-)

I can't imagine why!  We have many districts like the ones you described.  For instance, Billy's made-up school is based on a real-life school that was formed by a merger of a few smaller schools that joined together after the steel and coal industries moved out.  You would have folks of all stripes going to the same school, which is why someone as poor as Dustin can go to the same school with people like Joey and Sarah.  Much like I described in the story, it's rare that someone from the poorer population is able to reach the heights of prestige and privilege because of who there are, not based on their abilities.  Your last name can pen or close a lot of doors.  But then, I'm cynical like Billy.

[jkwsquirrel]

A list came out of the 50 worst schools in the state (sorry, commonwealth) of Pennsylvania.  The school on which I very loosely based the school in WAR made the list with a 35% proficiency rating in math, a 54% proficiency rating in reading, and a 94% graduation rate.  Way to go Mr. Taylor!  

[Shadow086]

Him and Carl Stevens fit the description of the biggest fish in a very small pond.