Lancaster, PA school district didn't cave to ACLU, appealed refugee students case to higher court

01/02/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

https://www.aclupa.org/

In my previous post I noted that the media (the New York Times) is working overtime to sell the public on the notion that everything is just peachy in Lancaster with the decades-old refugee program there. Then we see stories like this one that indicate at least some segments of the community are not thrilled at all—namely the school system.
BTW, see my Ten Things your town needs to know when ‘welcoming’ refugees and see that the first great impact on your community will most likely be in the school system.
Look how much this lawsuit filed by the ACLU is costing Lancaster taxpayers! If your town becomes a new ‘welcoming’ site, be prepared for unanticipated costs like these!
From Keystone Crossroads (hat tip: Joanne):

About 17,000 of the refugees arriving each year in the U.S. are children, yet their education — in particular, how public schools might accommodate them — plays a surprisingly minor role in placing families.

Federal law says public schools have to adjust to meet any number of students’ varying needs, including overcoming language barriers.

But that doesn’t always happen.

A few lawsuits have been filed in recent years on behalf of student refugees suffering the consequences of systematic shortcomings.

Schools have settled out of court in most cases.

Not Lancaster.

[….]

Lawyers for the Pennsylvania ACLU and Philadelphia-based Education Law Center sued the School District of Lancaster last summer.

The lawsuit claims that, despite the city’s robust tradition of resettlement, several teenage refugees waited months to enroll in public school. Ultimately, they were denied outright or diverted to magnet school Phoenix Academy, which has less support for nonnative English speakers than mainstream McCaskey High School.

[….]

In the meantime, a judicial panel in Philadelphia is considering Lancaster’s appeal. (See that story here)

[….]

Whether the district’s on the hook for any expenses depends on how the case turns out.

Defense attorneys’ bills are at about $150,000 so far, according to the district’s business administrator Matthew Przywara. The ACLU’s costs are approaching $2 million.

But Lancaster’s insurer has indicated it won’t pay out more than $100,000 for this lawsuit, district officials say.

There is more, continue reading here.
If the ACLU prevails be forewarned for refugee resettlement to your town to become even more expensive!
Click here for more on Lancaster, PA. Someone should do a study of the negative impact on this longtime resettlement site.

BT! Church World Service working hard to get Syrian Muslims placed in Lancaster, PA

01/02/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

BT=Before Trump
This is the first of two posts (second one is here) on Lancaster, PA this morning. I’ve been interested in Lancaster ever since that city’s refugee program was linked to Church World Service’s (CWS) placement of refugees in my county seat. Those were mostly Meshketian (Russian Turkish Muslims) back in 2007.
Five years later, I traveled to Lancaster to a meeting of the refugee industry there—the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement was meeting with refugee contractors and advocates in 2013. A federal ORR employee shocked me by referring to any of the communities questioning the program as “pockets of resistance.” He was happy to tell the gathering that Pennsylvania was ‘welcoming’ and didn’t have any PORs.

cws-mccullough-arrest — Church World Service does not just resettle refugees, but they advocate for illegal aliens as well. CWS CEO Rev. John McCullough being arrested in Washington, DC protesting in support of Obama’s executive amnesty. Photo and story here: http://njfon.org/2015/04/08/faith-groups-challenge-fifth-circuit-court-on-presidents-immigration-actions/ McCullough pulls down an annual salary of over $300,000 a year from his CWS work and from “related organizations.” Page 13- 14 http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2015/134/080/2015-134080201-0c44e710-9.pdf

If you would like to get some background on Lancaster before reading this below, click here for our Lancaster archive.
This is the news that appeared in the New York Times and reposted here in Vermont newspaper. Church World Service (with the NYT) is trying so hard to make everything look so perfect in Lancaster. But, it isn’t and you will see what I mean in my next post.

Their [Syrian family—ed] imminent arrival explains all the commotion inside this slate-colored house in the small city of Lancaster, in south-central Pennsylvania. The state may have gone to Donald Trump, who likened the Syrian resettlement program to a “a great Trojan horse” for terrorists. But he isn’t president yet.

[….]

He [Josh, CWS’s 26 year old housing guy—ed] scours a government checklist of housing requirements for a resettlement [Contractors sign contracts to provide essential items for the refugees’ new home—ed], mindful that whatever he spends is deducted from a refugee’s one-time government grant of no more than $1,125. A family’s combined grants must cover its rent and other expenses until the nonprofit has helped the adults acquire Social Security numbers and jobs.

I want you to know (and the NYT doesn’t) that it is $1,125 per family member, so the Syrian family of 6 being discussed here will get $6,750 (plus welfare) and that CWS will get another approximately $6,750 as their share (of your tax dollars) to resettle this family (for their salaries and overhead).

Such encounters [Josh meets a refugee at Walmart***] happen often in Lancaster, whose rich history of acceptance is rooted, in part, in the influence of the Mennonites, Amish and other faiths. A glimpse of the local worldview came in January when a supportive rally of more than 200 people drowned out a much smaller anti-immigrant protest outside the Church World Service office in Lancaster. [See our report on the resistors rally, here.]

Sheila Mastropietro, the group’s longtime supervisor in Lancaster, took heart in the moment. It reflected a communal understanding of both the global refugee crisis and the rigorous screening process that refugees undergo before coming to the United States. [The communal understanding is wearing thin as you will see in my next post.—ed]

The big question for the resettlement contractors is: What will Trump do and when will he do it?

Still, given a president-elect who seems averse to the country’s modest commitment to refugee relocation, Mastropietro says, “We don’t know what to expect.”

[….]

Last fiscal year, the Lancaster office of the Church World Service helped to resettle 407 of the 85,000 refugees admitted to this country; this fiscal year, its target is 550 of a hoped-for 110,000.

“We are acting as if the numbers are going to be the same — until we hear something different,” she says.

Lancaster a happy “medley of cultures” (then why did Lancaster County go 57% for Trump):

Decades of resettlement work have transformed the Lancaster area into a medley of cultures so rich that Amer Alfayadh, 34, a senior case manager, struggles to name them all: “Syrians, Iraqis, Somalis, Congolese, Ukrainians, Belorussians, people from Kazakhstan. Then, of course, Lebanese, Palestinians. Bhutanese, Nepalese, Burmese, Sri Lankans …”

***I would love to know what the deal is with Walmart. Wherever I traveled on my middle America tour this past summer, I heard that Walmart was a gathering place for Muslim refugees. Is Walmart giving them gift cards or other goodies? Does anyone know?

9/11 Mastermind explains why they call it the 'Religion of Peace'

01/02/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

james-michell-author — Get the book! https://www.amazon.com/Enhanced-Interrogation-Motives-Islamic-Terrorists/dp/1101906847/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483361554&sr=8-1&keywords=enhanced+interrogation+mitchell

This is the 5th in my series on James Mitchell’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ where the CIA contractor tells us how Enhanced Interrogation Techniques did work to reveal not only upcoming planned terror attacks, but also revealed the mindset behind the Islamic supremacists’ view of how things should be in the world.
Our initial interest was in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s assertion that the Islamists’ plan is to conquer America through immigration and by out-breeding us, but that violent attacks would ultimately wear us down and prepare us for submission.
See previous posts here, here , here and here.

screenshot-110

Make it your new year’s resolution to learn more about Islam!

P.S. I sure hope Donald Trump takes time to read this book!

US State Dept. announces 'new' program to admit Iraqis persecuted by ISIS

01/02/2017 ~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Frankly folks, I’m suspicious. If the Obama Administration had any interest in saving the Yazidis, what took them so long? And, why this new category of refugee just as Obama exits the White House.

trump-serious — My opinion is that this is a political move to shame Trump if he tries to slow the massive flow from Iraq.

My first thought upon reading this article at Voice of America (VOA) is that the State Dept. is setting up this special category of Iraqi refugee (btw, we admitted 122,532 Iraqis over Obama’s 8 years), so when Trump comes in and tries to pause the program from certain terror-producing regions of the world, the Left/Dems will scream and holler that he is opposed to saving Yazidis, Christians and other religious minorities.
A brief mention of the Center for American Progress by Voice of America makes me suspicious and my guess is that this story was fed to VOA by CAP. You know that is the group John Podesta created with George Soros and the Clintons (see my 2009 post) and if you enjoyed reading John Podesta’s Wikileaks e-mails you will recognize the name Neera Tanden who is CAP’s Prez. and was on the Clinton team.

The article reads like we haven’t been hauling Iraqis to America by the tens of thousands during the Obama Administration (see numbers below).

Voice of America:
WASHINGTON —

The U.S. government is working to permanently resettle hundreds of Iraqis who were victims of Islamic State (IS) violence.

lawrence-bartlett — Bartlett is most likely a career government employee. Trump will appoint someone above him as Asst. Sec. of State for PRM, but like all federal agencies there will be many entrenched bureaucrats working their own angles against Trump policies.

Larry Bartlett, director of the Office of Refugee Admissions at the State Department told VOA that the U.S. is coordinating with the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to bring in hundreds of Iraqis to several to be determined locations in the U.S. Most of them are Yazidis and Christians whose communities were uprooted by IS. Many of them suffered brutality and torture at the hands of IS.

[….]

The resettlement efforts mark the first widespread attempt by the U.S. to admit Iraqis who survived under IS. [So who was persecuting the 122,000 plus we admitted in the last 8 years?—ed]

[….]

“We confirmed that Yazidis were the most traumatized [and] were the most victimized,” Bartlett said. “But there are other groups that were also affected by [IS] such as Christians and other religious minorities up there in the north.”

[….]

“We would expect that within a course of a year we would do hundreds of people,” Bartlett said. “One of the things we want to focus on is resettling families as a whole. There have been other programs in the past where just some of the victims were resettled for treatment. We are looking at this differently. We are looking at this as a family unity program of linking families together as much as possible.” [And, we haven’t been bringing families?—ed]

There is more, continue reading here.
BTW, interesting that Bartlett is making this announcement. Is Anne Richard (Asst. Sec. of State for Population, Refugees and Migration) busy packing up her office?

So let’s look at the numbers for Iraqi refugees admitted to the US since Obama took office!

And, remember readers that refugees by definition are supposed to be escaping persecution for one of several reasons (including race, religion, political views).
From the very beginning I have asked: so if Sunni Muslims persecute Shiite Muslims in Iraq and vice versa, does it make any sense to bring in both warring factions, and place them in your towns as we have been doing for over 8 years (Bush reluctantly opened the Iraqi flood gates at the end of his Administration).
From Fiscal Year 2009 until December 1, 2016 (8 fiscal years and a few months) we admitted to the US 122,532 Iraqi refugees (in some of those years Iraqis were the top ethnic group we resettled).
The numbers break down like this:

Sunni Muslims: 44,367

Shiite Muslims: 32,766

Moslems (not specified): 1,887

Catholics: 13,306

Christians (not specified): 21,173

Yazidis: 1,215

There were many other groups, including some other Christian denominations that were smaller in number.
So, I will ask again, who was persecuting the Muslims? Are they persecuting each other and thus they are eligible for refugee status? Sure looks like it!
For ambitious readers, this is the 715th post I’ve written about Iraqi refugees, see Iraqi category here.