Safe & Drug Free Schools Czar - Kevin Jennings

Safe & Drug Free Schools Czar - Kevin Jennings

Kevin Brett Jennings (born May 8, 1963) is an American educator, author, and administrator. He is currently the Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education.

Jennings holds degrees from Harvard University, Columbia University's Teachers College, and the Stern School of Business at New York University. He founded the Gay and Lesbian Independent School Teachers Education Network in 1990, which became a leading group activist group that sought to end discrimination, harassment, and bullying based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The organization later changed its name to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. In 1992 he was named co-chair of the Education Committee of the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth in Massachusetts. Jennings has authored six books on gay rights and education, including one which won the Lambda Literary Award.
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Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools

On May 19, 2009, Obama administration Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced Jennings' appointment as an Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools,[4] starting July 6, 2009[17] as the third director of the office, which was established in 2002 during the George W. Bush administration pursuant to the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.[18]

Social conservatives criticized Jennings' appointment, and are actively working to have him removed from his position, because of allegations that Jennings condoned child molestation and because of sexually explicit books that were recommended by his organization.[19][20] Critics claim that these books reflect upon Jennings' beliefs, a charge that has been strongly denied by his backers.[12] Critics of Jennings’ appointment also pointed to his alleged admissions of past drug use[21][22] and his alleged 2000 public statement indicating that members of the religious right should “drop dead.”[19][20][23] 53 Republican members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to the Obama administration that called for Jennings' dismissal.[24] Education Secretary Duncan, the White House, the NEA, and the National Association of Secondary School Principals have supported Jennings' appointment,[12][25][26] with Duncan saying Jennings was “uniquely qualified for his job.”[24]

As Assistant Deputy Secretary, Jennings has focused on matters relating to teacher safety, classroom discipline and bullying.[27] His office has also awarded safety grants worth millions of dollars.[27]

[much more....]
SOURCE: Kevin Jennings - Wikipedia
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Kevin Jennings - http://keywiki.org/index.php/Kevin_Jennings

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* Founder of GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network)
In 2007 Jennings was paid $273,573.96 as the executive director of GLSEN, an organization that receives public and private funding. The image to the right is of a scanned in copy of GLSEN's 2007 990 IRS form, sourced by the Founding Bloggers blog.
Kevin Jennings' Biography on GLSEN: http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/library/record/1808.html

* Kevin Jennings: Kevin's postings on Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-jennings

* Kevin Jennings addressed the "Day of Silence, Night of Noise" GLBT youth event, April 28, 2004

* As a teacher, when a 15 year year said he was having sex with an older man, instead of turning in the man "the law for a teacher, he asked how it was going and suggested they use condoms.

* Held a conference with the MAXIMUM age of 18 to teach homosexual issues like fisting.

* Wrote the intro to the book, "Queering Elementary Education."

* Has repeatedly praised and claims to be inspired by Harry Hay, early supporter of NAMBLA, (North American Man Boy Love Association).

The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is a national homosexual activist group targeting children in the public schools. Its founder, Kevin Jennings, was recently appointed to a high position in U. S. Department of Education by Barack Obama. GLSEN is part of the tax-supported Massachusetts Commission on Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Youth. (In fact, GLSEN's membership in that commission is mandated by law!)

On March 25, 2000, GLSEN put on a conference called "TeachOut" for kids across and public school teachers across Massachusetts. This conference was co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Education.

At this conference children as young as 12 years old were taught by state employees how to engage in various extremely dangerous (and disgusting) homosexual sex acts. Scott Whiteman, then an employee of Parents Rights Coalition (as MassResistance was known then) attended the conference and tape-recorded those workshops. Soon afterwards, a tape was released with the actual voices of the adults -- state employees -- made during the workshop (described below). That tape sent shock waves across the country. The story was covered by media in the US and other countries, and is even written about in several books. Soon afterwards a court banned the posting or distribution of the "Fistgate" tape until recently.

The following article was written by Scott Whiteman and Brian Camenker immediately after the incident and was published in the May, 2000, issue of Massachusetts News. It led to national media coverage and two lawsuits.

Source: Mass Resistance - http://www.massresistance.org/docs/issues/fistgate/index.html

OBAMA APPOINTEE KEVIN JENNINGS: FISTING AND “[F–k] ‘em” to the “Religious Right”

President Obama has appointed Kevin Jennings, founder of GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network) — which sponsored the conference that produced the notorious “Fistgate” scandal (in which young teens were guided on how to perform dangerous homosexual perversions including “fisting”) — to head up “Safe Schools” efforts at the Department of Education. Jennings is a vicious, anti-religious bigot who once said “[F–k] ‘em” to the “Religious Right.” He supports promoting homosexuality and gender confusion as normative to even young students. He made that comment in a New York City church. TAKE ACTION: Urge your U.S. Congressman and Senators to call for the withdrawal of Jennings’ appointment at the Education Department. Call Congress at 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121.

More here: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/06/obama-appointee-kevin-jennings-fisting-and-fk-em-to-the-religious-right.html

PROGRESSIVE SPIN on Kevin Jennings on Media Matters
http://mediamattersaction.org/smears/kevin_jennings
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FACT CHECK: The Right-Wing Smear Campaign Against Kevin Jennings
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/03/kevin-jennings/

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Underage Sex Advice Controversy

A professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, Warren Throckmorton was given a tape of a 2000 lecture by Kevin Jennings discussing Brewster. He was speaking to a GLSEN rally in Iowa where he told the audience of one of his experiences as a teacher in 1988:

"Brewster was missing a lot of classes; he was in the boarding school so I said to his first period teacher, I said, ‘next time Brewster misses a class I want you to tell me that he’s missed that class and, uh, I will go find him.’ So I went and found Brewster one morning when she had called and he was asleep in his dorm room. And I said, “Brewster, what are you doing in there asleep?” And he said, “Well, I’m tired.” And I said, “Well we all are tired and we all got to school today.” And he said, “Well I was out late last night.” And I said, “What were you doing out late on a school night.” And he said, “Well, I was in Boston…” Boston was about 45 minutes from Concord. So I said, “What were you doing in Boston on a school night Brewster?” He got very quiet, and he finally looked at me and said, “Well I met someone in the bus station bathroom and I went home with him.” High school sophomore, 15 years old. That was the only way he knew how to meet gay people. I was a closeted gay teacher, 24 years old, didn’t know what to say. Knew I should say something quickly so I finally said, My best friend had just died of AIDS the week before. I looked at Brewster and said, “You know, I hope you knew to use a condom.” He said to me something I will never forget, He said “Why should I, my life isn’t worth saving anyway.”"[2] (click here for audio)

On October 3, 2009 Brewster contacted CNN telling them that he did not in fact have sex with that man at all, and that he was 16 at the time of the incident; not 15 as Jennings states he had told him, the morning after the incident. Brewster recounted his version of the event:

"In 1988, I had taken a bus home for the weekend, and on the return trip met someone who was also gay. The next day, I had a conversation with Mr. Jennings about it. I had no sexual contact with anybody at the time, though I was entirely legally free to do so. I was a 16-year-old going through something most of us have experienced: adolescence."[3]

Jennings was of the understanding that the boy was fifteen-years-old and that he had had sex with an older man. Under Massachusetts law such an event was statutory rape, with the requirement of reporting it to the authorities. CNN obtained a copy of Brewster's driver's license, verifying that he was in fact 16 at the time of the incident. However as has been maintained, "Whether Brewster was 15 years old or just turned 16, a sophomore having sex with an older man he met at a bus station bathroom should have raised alarm... A teacher ignoring a female sophomore's confession that she met an older man in a bathroom and then went home with him should have raised similar concerns."[4]

[more....]
SOURCE: http://keywiki.org/index.php/Kevin_Jennings

Face It, People - Kevin Jennings Is Fine With Child Adult Sex

Zombie seems to be making an ernest attempt to give Safe School czar Kevin Jennings a chance to make things right on Harry Hay. But that's impossible once we look at what Jennings himself actually did. Michelle Malkin offers some additional links. But I looked into this myself.

The fact of the matter is Jennings supports promiscuous sex between kids of 15 - 16 and full grown adults. Anyone can research it. I posted on it here. He didn't counsel a student on a "relationship". It involved pick-up sex in a bathroom with an adult who took him home. Despite the adult never calling the kid back, the student went on to continue to indulge in such activities and share them repeatedly with Jennings. All Jennings ever did was tell him to use a condom.

In another account Jennings confirms that the student continued to share other stories with him, some that even bothered him. Yet, he did nothing. Just read my linked quotes.

According to Mr. Jennings' own description in a new audiotape discovered by Fox News, the 15-year-old boy met the "older man" in a "bus station bathroom" and was taken to the older man's home that night. When some details about the case became public, Mr. Jennings threatened to sue another teacher who called his failure to report the statutory rape "unethical." Mr. Jennings' defenders asserted that there was no evidence that he was aware the student had sex with the older man.

However, the new audiotape contradicts this claim. In 2000, Mr. Jennings gave a talk to the Iowa chapter of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, an advocacy group that promotes homosexuality in schools. On the tape, Mr. Jennings recollected that he told the student to make sure "to use a condom" when he was with the older man. That he actively encouraged the relationship is reinforced by Mr. Jennings' own description in his 1994 book, "One Teacher in 10." In that account, the teacher boasts how he allayed the student's concerns about the relationship to such a degree that the 15-year-old "left my office with a smile on his face that I would see every time I saw him on the campus for the next two years, until he graduated."

On page 162, Jennings writes: "Robertson soon told me the tale, about someone he'd met in Boston, how he thought he loved him, how heartbroken he was when his calls never got returned..." On page 169, he continues: "As the fall wore on, Robertson continued to drop by my office to chat, often updating me on his latest 'adventures.' Sometimes these startled me, and I began to underline the importance of safe sex to him. One day he snapped back, 'Why should I use a condom? My life isn't worth saving anyway.'"

Safe schools? Yeah, right. And Chicago of all places even tried to create a school just for gays. Back to segregation for the Democrats, I guess. Not much has changed, only the minority group.

It was slated to open in Chicago- 2010 - a public school exclusively for gays who have been bullied. They got some push back, so now it is supposed to be open to all bullied students. But the initial plan was definitely gay only. So much for teaching tolerance. I guess all the chicago kids can go to one place to kick some butt for kicks. Viktum HS, Chicago USA thanks to Obama's Ed team. Amazing. As of now my understanding is they've made it into a school for "bullied" students, including gays. But any student who somehow feels put upon will be segregated. Nothing like keeping weak people weak. It's the usual Democrat motif.

SOURCE: http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2009/10/face-it-people-kevin-jennings-is-fine-with-child-adult-sex.html

An outspoken advocate for homosexuals, as well as a writer and educator, Kevin Jennings has served since July 2009 as assistant deputy secretary to head the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools in the U.S. Department of Education. Founded in 2002, the Office administers drug and violence prevention programs for students in elementary and secondary schools and institutions of higher education.

Born May 8, 1963, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Jennings was the youngest of five children to Chester Henry, an itinerant Southern Baptist preacher, and Alice Verna (Johnson) Jennings, who had only a grade-school education. His economically-disadvantaged family moved numerous times around the South while Jennings grew up, and he would eventually attend nine schools in four states. At the age of eight his father died while the family was living in a trailer park in Lewisville, North Carolina. He spent much of his adolescence in rural communities that hated African Americans and gay people; several of his cousins and uncles were in the Ku Klux Klan.

He attended Paisley Magnet School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was beaten up by other students for his effeminate behavior. He tried to kill himself after discovering he was gay.

After he and his mother moved to Hawaii, Jennings graduated from Radford High School in Honolulu in 1981, and went on to become the first member of his family to graduate from college. He received his bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude) in history from Harvard University, delivering the Harvard Oration at the 1985 commencement.

From 1985 to 1987, he was a high school history teacher at Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island, then at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, from 1987 to 1995. While at Concord Academy in 1988, he became the faculty advisor to the nation's first Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA).

In 1990, Jennings founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a local volunteer group in the Boston area bringing together lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and straight teachers, parents, students and community members who wanted to end anti-LGBT bias in the state’s K-12 schools.

In 1992, he was appointed by Governor William Weld (R-Massachusetts) to co-chair the education committee of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. He was the principal author of its report, “Making Schools Safer for Gay and Lesbian Youth: Breaking the Silence in Schools and in Families,” whose recommendations were adopted as policy by the Massachusetts State Board of Education. The commission led the fight that made Massachusetts the first state in the nation to outlaw discrimination against public school students on the basis of sexual orientation and to establish, in 1993, a statewide program to ensure educational equity on issues of sexual orientation.

In 1993, Jennings was named a Joseph Klingenstein Fellow at Columbia University’s Teachers College, from which he received his master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies in education in 1994.

He subsequently left teaching to set about building the all-volunteer GLSEN organization into a national force. Under his leadership, GLSEN made safe schools into a national issue, increased by more than 600% the number of students protected from harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity, and grew the number of GSAs from under 50 in 1995 to more than 4,300 when he stepped down in 2008. Under Jennings’ leadership, GLSEN programs like No Name-Calling Week and Day of Silence were established in American schools.

Jennings earned an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business in 1999.

He has authored or edited six books, including Telling Tales Out of School: Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals Revisit Their School Days (2000), Always My Child: A Parent's Guide to Understanding Your Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered or Questioning Son or Daughter (2002) and Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son(2006). He also helped write and produce the documentary Out of the Past, which won the 1998 Sundance Film Festival audience award for best documentary.

Jennings serves on the boards of the Harvard Alumni Association and Union Theological Seminary. He is president of the board for the Tectonic Theater Project. He is the national fundraising chair for the Appalachian Community Fund, where he established the Alice Jennings Fund to help low-income and battered women.

In the fall of 2009, Jennings came under attack by social conservatives over a passage in a 1994 book he edited, One Teacher in Ten: Gay and Lesbian Educators Tell Their Stories, in which he talked about giving condom advice to a 15-year-old student who was having a relationship with an adult male. Conservatives objected to his failure to notify the student’s parents or authorities about the illegal relationship. Jennings publicly expressed regret over the way he handled the matter many years earlier, and he remained in his job despite calls for his dismissal.

Jennings is a founding member of the New York City Gay Hockey Association and occasionally plays left wing for the Hotshots. In August 2005, he had a heart attack on the rink, but returned to the ice two years later.

He lives with his partner, Jeff Davis, the managing director of Global Equities Business Strategy at Barclays, and their three dogs.



http://www.allgov.com/Appointments_and_Resignations/ViewNews/Office_of_Safe_and_Drug_Free_Schools__Who_is_Kevin_Jennings_101113