The hidden warning in the 2018 midterms

The hidden warning in the 2018 midterms 


On the surface, last week's midterm elections really weren't awful. Sure, the left picked up a House majority, but the president's party routinely loses ground in Congress in midterm elections. Hell, even President Ronald Reagan saw the GOP lose yardage in the 1982 and 1986 midterms. Granted, having to say, "Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi" is like saying "Sure, I'll have seconds of the stewed beets," but at least that "Beto" clown got his walking papers. Besides, the GOP can stock the federal judiciary with competent judges while the House Democrats spend the next two years arguing over whose name goes first on the latest bill to impeach President Donald Trump. Indeed, far from the anticipated hemorrhage, last week was more like a bad paper cut. Sure, it stings, but it won't even require stitches.



But that's on the surface. Beneath the veneer of acceptable losses, the midterms offered a warning that the GOP had bloody well better take seriously. While the infection of liberalism is slowly spreading to cover nearly the entire East Coast, and has essentially destroyed the opposite shore, it appears to be metastasizing to far-flung regions of the American body. Senator Ted Cruz defeated "Beto," but he hardly stomped him flat, and O'Rourke's campaign taught the Democrats that they can use their control of the media in concert with a monster spending campaign to great effect.

In Arizona, voters gave John McCain's already-shaky Republican seat to far-left Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. The changing demographics in the desert turned their backs on badass A-10 pilot Rep. Martha McSally to embrace a liberal who spent half her campaign discussing how much she hated them.

Deep in the heart of Dixie, the Democrats, who haven't dominated the landscape since they still had real KKK members on their roster, made noticeable noise. Although Stacey Abrams didn't win, she made a hell of a splash. Again, a "red" state turned purple by fawning media coverage working hand-in-glove with liberal cash. Considering Abrams on her own was a gaffe-prone curiosity, it's fair to say that her success essentially means Oprah Winfrey almost bought a governor's mansion.

In Florida, Representative Ron DeSantis barely outpointed socialist Mayor Andrew Gillum of Tallahassee in a gubernatorial contest which involved little more than Gillum using the media to paint DeSantis — and anyone else who mentioned his appalling corruption — as racist. In the Sunshine State's Senate battle, Phil Scott edged incumbent Bill Nelson in a race which I doubt Scott could have won without his own foundation as governor.

It's worth noting that both Florida and Georgia face junior varsity versions of the disputed presidential election of 2000. Much like that farce, Abrams, Nelson and Gillum are all engaged in brazen attempts to "find" enough votes to steal victory from the jaws of defeat. Perhaps learning their lesson from Al Gore's famous faceplant, the trio are using a combination of celebrity money and media misinformation to manipulate the situation to their advantage. Facts about bogus votes and imaginary attempts at voter suppression have faded behind celebrity- and reporter-spouted half-truths, outright lies and tangential character attacks on the Republicans. They've even begun floating the idea of "House" and "Senate popular votes" as being proof of a need to reduce American elections to pure popularity contests.

While the Democrats came uncomfortably close to the winner's circles in places in which they would formerly have been also-rans, they produced winners deep in their liberal redoubts who would have been on the other side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Much like the lukewarm leftists who are spreading like mold into places like Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Virginia, the ones at the heart of the infection will look for ways to escape their urban confines. Given their innate authoritarianism, their "by any means necessary" mantra is clearly more than a metaphor.

The GOP may have come out ahead of short-term expectations last week, but their long-term expectations may need some tempering. If they — and, more importantly, conservatives as a whole — don't get their acts together, the next close calls will go the opposite way.

— Ben Crystal 

Regulations Threaten to Limit Best Schooling Options for Children

Lindsey Burke  The Daily Signal

 

What is the measure of a good school? And who is best positioned to decide what works?

For decades, policymakers and education officials have attempted to bolster school “accountability” by increasing regulations on schools across the board—public, charter, and private. They have tried to do so at the federal level for half a century, with federal intervention in K-12 education hitting a high-water mark under the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind policy and the Obama administration’s attempts to pressure states into adopting Common Core.

Yet ever-increasing government intervention in schooling has had little positive impact on education outcomes writ large. Math and reading achievement outcomes have been largely stagnant since the 1970s for high school seniors, while graduation rates have seen only modest improvements (and even those figures may be artificially inflated).

About one-third of high school graduates have to take remedial courses in college, one-third of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, and 20 percent of high school graduates who want to join the Army cannot do so because they cannot pass the Armed Forces Qualification Test.

It’s no surprise, then, that families have been looking for alternatives to geographically-assigned district schools. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have begun to offer alternatives, enacting private school choice options such as vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts.

Although the education choice landscape is growing, government officials who take a heavy-handed approach to regulation threaten its long-term success. Instead of freeing traditional public schools from bureaucratic red tape that has tied the hands of educators and stifled innovation, some policymakers want to expand that top-down regulatory approach to the growing private school choice sector.

Take, for example, the Louisiana Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers to eligible families to enroll their child in a private school of their choice. In order for private schools to participate, they must adhere to a host of government regulations, including the requirement that all students on a scholarship take the same standardized test administered to public schools in the state.

Some private school principals have been concerned that regulations like this would drive school curriculum, thereby discouraging schools from participating. Indeed, just one-third of private schools in Louisiana participate in the program, and an experimental evaluation found that participation in the program had a negative effect on student academic achievement.

We are now beginning to better understand the way regulations affect private schools’ willingness to participate in private school choice programs. We are also seeing that Louisiana’s “accountability” measures had unintended consequences, and that could happen elsewhere.

Along with Corey DeAngelis of the Cato Institute and Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, we recently released the first experimental evaluation of the effects of various regulations on the willingness of private school principals to have their school participate in a hypothetical voucher program. We randomly assigned one of three different regulations—or no government regulation—as part of school participation in a hypothetical voucher program.

We found that an open enrollment requirement (mandating that private schools take all students who apply as a condition for participating in a voucher program) decreased the likelihood that private school leaders in Florida were “certain to participate” in the voucher program by around 17 percentage points.

At the same time, requiring participating private schools to administer a standardized test to their students decreased the likelihood that private school leaders were “certain to participate” by around 11 percentage points.

Standardized testing requirements appear to depress private school participation in school choice programs, which could partly explain what has transpired in the Louisiana Scholarship Program. High-quality private schools, as measured by tuition and enrollment growth, may have decided that the regulatory burden exceeded the benefits of participating in the program, and as a result, remained on the sidelines of the Louisiana Scholarship Program.

Although a growing body of literature is demonstrating that regulations on school choice programs generally correlate with lower rates of program participation, testing mandates—which in the hypothetical Florida experiment reduced school participation by 44 percent—are particularly notable for what little value parents place in them.

EdChoice recently released the results of the largest survey ever conducted of participants in a private school choice program. Parents participating in Florida’s tax credit scholarship program were asked to list the top three factors that influenced their decision to have their child attend their chosen private school. Only two factors—religious environment and instruction (66 percent) and morals/character/values-based instruction (52 percent)—were selected by a majority of scholarship parents.

Thirty-six percent of respondents listed a safe environment among their top three priorities when selecting a school for their child. The least important factor was standardized test scores. Just 4 percent of respondents listed standardized test scores as one of their top three factors.

Not only were families overwhelmingly satisfied with the tax credit scholarship program—92 percent of scholarship families reported being satisfied—but it is clear that Florida parents are choosing their child’s private school because those schools offered what their public schools either could not or would not.

So what do all of these findings mean?

At the very least, they suggest policymakers must be humble in their assumptions about what parents want in their children’s schools, and about their ability to drive quality through regulations.

A growing body of evidence suggests regulations, including standardized testing mandates, can depress school participation in private school choice programs. At the same time, while such regulations can discourage school participation (limiting the options available to families), they do not rise anywhere near the top of the factors parents value when choosing a school.

Parents are much more interested in those intangibles that standardized tests cannot capture, but that are more important to the long-term flourishing of their children, such as religious and values-based instruction. And for good reason: As Jay Greene has identified, we do not regularly see a relationship between changing test scores and later life outcomes.

Indeed, what parents are looking for is something apart from what their child’s traditional district school offered. To condition private school participation in a school choice program on adherence to the public school formula—as the Louisiana Scholarship Program does—renders school choice less meaningful by reducing the number of substantially different options available to families.

Policymakers should avoid being like the proverbial drunk looking for his lost keys under the lamppost because “that’s where the light is.” Standardized tests shine a light on an important aspect of school performance, but sometimes the keys are not under the light.

Families prioritize aspects of schooling that are less measurable, but equally or more important. Families want schools that will form children of good moral character. They want schools that will prepare their children to pursue their life and career goals. They want meaningful instruction in a safe school setting.

Choice is providing them access to just that.

1/1024th Pocahontas, 1023/1024ths Pinocchio

1/1024th Pocahontas, 1023/1024ths Pinocchio 

On Monday, when Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren threatened to campaign for the presidency, I figured we'd owe The Donald a second huge one. The guy who saved us from Granny Clinton would rescue us from another Angry Old (Almost Entirely) White Woman. Fortunately, he clearly relished the prospect: "I think she'd be very easy [to beat]," he gloated.

But now it appears that Fauxcahontas' fascination with her mythic Cherokee forbear has done her in before Trump could. It's so bad that even the utterly insane Left has tired of her insanity.

Yeah, I know: the Dimocrats promote Maxine Waters (Lunatic-The People's Democratic Republic of California), Marxism despite its slaughtered millions, the incoherent Nancy Pelosi ($125 Millionaire-PDR of CA), violence and unquestioning faith in such hoaxes as global warming and transgenderism; why draw the line at Fauxcahontas' antics?

I can't say, unless it's her departure from their creed that DNA evidence, like all scientific fact and truth in general, doesn't matter. She insists her chromosomes confirm that she's Indian while Dims aver that men pretending to be women are female, regardless of chromosomes. Too bad Fauxcahontas didn't whine, "Look, I identify as Native American. Yeah, I'm pale, but I'm still transitioning." Her party would not only defend but nominate her in a heartbeat.

Whoops: I hope I didn't give her any ideas. But if I did, count on Trump to deliver us.

Don't get me wrong: Many of the president's policies destroy freedom as mercilessly as his predecessors' did. But in refreshing contrast to those professional politicians, Trump the amateur occasionally enhances our liberty. Exhibit #1: His preventing such harridans as Shrillary and Fauxcahontas from tyrannizing us.

Meanwhile, The Squaw is doubtless too arrogant to admit defeat. And so we can anticipate belly-laughs aplenty as she continues coveting the planet's most powerful position. Like all Marxists, Fauxcahontas lacks even a vestigial funny-bone. That makes her as perfect a straight guy for Trump's delicious zingers as Killary was. Short of shooting them, ridiculing commies is the most effective way to neutralize them.

Here's a Special Message

We have a preview of such entertainment in Fauxcahontas' hyping the report on her DNA. Anyone whose power-lust hadn't blinded her, who owned even a scintilla of common sense, would have chuckled at the unreliability of family legends in general and this one about Indian progenitors in particular. But not Fauxcahontas. How stupid is she — or how stupid does she assume we are — to believe that someone whose DNA "suggests she's between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American" is actually Indian? Note that "suggesting" differs as much from "substantiating" as a prevaricating politician does from an honest Cherokee warrior. No wonder the "prominent expert in the field" who analyzed Faux's genes carefully chose the same word: "The facts suggest that you absolutely have Native American ancestry in your pedigree." Ah, but the Chicago Tribune has already answered us skeptics, even if it mistakenly printed its reprimand as news rather than on the editorial page: "Such a finding could potentially further excite her critics instead of placating them." You bet it does. Folks whom a liar has falsely charged with lying thrill to the truth.

Let me confess that I — and millions of other Americans whose forefathers arrived here centuries ago — boast diluted bloodlines similar to Fauxcahontas'. My mother's family has always maintained that an "Indian princess" entered our lineage enough generations ago that all confirming details are as absent as Warren's conscience. No one knows the "princess'" name, whom she supposedly married, or when they tied the knot. Still, the notion that she graces our heritage refuses to die: someone asks about it at every family reunion. (And we have the high cheekbones to prove it!)

What neither I nor anyone else in the family has done — and likely none of the millions of other "natives" out there — is trade on this intriguing possibility, let alone build a career on it. Yet we're more entitled to do so than Fauxcahontas: a study in 2014 "found that European-Americans had genomes ... on average ... .18 [percent] Native American." That means we contain "nearly double the amount of American Indian DNA (0.18 percent) as Elizabeth Warren (0.098 percent), who claims to be Cherokee."

See? I told you this was would be fun.

Nor is her bogus blood Fauxcahontas' only whopper. Consider her tale of bigoted grandparents: "...my father's family didn't like that [my mother] was part Cherokee and part Delaware, so my parents had to elope,' she said."

Oh, right. If her "Native American ancestor ... lived six to 10 generations ago,"a best-case scenario means that one of her mother's grandparents' grandparents might have belonged to a tribe. When you've stopped chortling, tell me whether you know or care about the ethnicity of your spouse's grandparents' grandparents. Yet after implying that her mother is as deceitful as she while painting herself as a moron for crediting so improbable a story, she accuses Trump of "lik[ing] to call my mother a liar..."

Fauxcahontas also denies that she exploited her fictitious "ancestry to win preferential treatment as a law professor..." Balderdash. Even the Boston Globe admits that "a Harvard Law School spokesman referr[ed] to her as a Native American" and that "she had her ethnicity changed from white to Native American..." Fauxcahontas has lied so much for so long that we should change her nickname to Pinocchio.

Dissimulating is bad enough, but equally repugnant is Pinocchio's fixation on a circumstance of birth beyond her control. Yet what else can we expect when Progressives' mentors range from Darwin (whose "natural selection" heavily influenced the ultimate Progressive god, Karl Marx, as well as the 20th century's genocide) to Margaret Sanger (not only Planned Parenthood's founder but a racist striving to exterminate black people)? Indeed, Progressives obsess over race as endlessly as did Adolf Hitler, who modeled his concentration camps on those that Washington, D.C., constructed for American Indians. You might assume that last would scare Squaw Pinocchio, but alas, she ceaselessly pushes group-identity.

How tragic. Even more tragic, this mendacious Marxist typifies American politicians.

Claim From Left: Requiring Voter Registration Is ‘Voter Suppression’ Tool

Hans von Spakovsky The Daily Signal 

As Election Day rapidly approaches, the radical Left is making yet another absurd claim: that requiring voter registration is a “voter suppression” tool.

Registration is essential to assure the integrity of elections. It allows election officials to verify the eligibility and identity of voters. It also enables them to make sure they will have enough ballots in polling places that use paper ballots — and that’s the majority of jurisdictions across the U.S.

The Washington Times recently reported that the Texas Democratic Party “asked noncitizens to register to vote, sending out applications to immigrants with the box [on] citizenship already checked ‘Yes.’” And Texas is not the only state where the accuracy and integrity of the voter-registration process is imperiled.

To improve the accuracy of the state’s records, Georgia legislators last year passed a law requiring voter-registration-application information to match a “driver’s license, state ID card or Social Security record.” Inconsistencies can cause a voter’s registration to be flagged as “pending” while the discrepancy is investigated.

Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor, accuses the Republican candidate and current secretary of state, Brian Kemp, of “voter suppression” simply for complying with this law.

But here’s the rub: A “pending” status does not bar anyone from voting. All they need do is “show a government photo ID that substantially matches the registration application.” Even if the voter’s information can’t be verified on the spot, the voter can cast a provisional ballot that will be counted once the registration information is verified by local election officials.

How can that be “voter suppression?”

So why the uproar about voter registration? Abrams claims that Kemp’s effort to enforce the law is an “intentional move” to suppress votes, especially of minority voters. Kemp has refuted those claims and says that application discrepancies that make registrations “pending” are due to “sloppy forms” submitted by the New Georgia Project, a group founded by Abrams herself in 2014 that “set out to sign up 800,000 new young and minority voters.”

The real issue here is a disregard for election integrity. And that includes those who are calling for an end to traditional voter registration in favor of automatic voter registration based on government databases such as driver’s licenses and property-tax records.

While government records are useful for verifying voter registrations, research shows they would be ineffective in creating accurate voter rolls. One of the most glaring problems with these databases is that they cannot verify a basic eligibility requirement for voting — citizenship. Noncitizens can receive driver’s licenses in all 50 states, and illegal aliens are receiving licenses in more than a dozen states, including California. Noncitizens also pay property taxes. Automatic voter registration would register all such ineligible individuals.

Moreover, individuals can be listed multiple times in different government databases that would be a source for automatic registration. For example, one person may pay taxes in multiple counties and multiple states, raising the possibility that he could vote multiple times, in multiple jurisdictions.

Also, voter registration requires a signature to verify petitions, ballot initiatives, and absentee ballots. Many government databases don’t contain signatures and thus would be useless for verifying signatures.

Such issues came to light recently in California, where the DMV admitted that, in just the last two months, it had mistakenly registered 24,500 ineligible individuals, including noncitizens. The problem arose because of the state’s new voter-registration process, which automatically registers people who renew or replace their driver’s licenses. The error came to light only after a Canadian citizen told the media he had been improperly registered by the state.

No evidence exists that eliminating voter registration will increase turnout. In fact, Census Bureau data from the 2008 election found that individuals who were not registered to vote did not cite registration problems as the reason for not voting. Instead, 46 percent were not interested in the election and 35 percent listed other reasons, such as “not being eligible to vote, thinking their vote would not make a difference, not meeting residency requirements, or difficulty with English.” The biggest reason for individuals’ not registering and not voting is a lack of interest in politics and candidates, which has nothing to do with registration.

The registration fight in Georgia is just part of a larger effort by the Left to undo any reforms that increase the security and integrity of the voter-registration and election process. Ensuring election integrity begins with creating and maintaining accurate voter rolls. Voter registration is an essential part of the process, and it should be a bipartisan effort.

Originally published by National Review.

POSTED ON OCTOBER 5, 2018 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN ACADEMIC LEFT, BRETT KAVANAUGH, DEMOCRATS, MEDIA BIAS

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the Supreme Court tomorrow, bringing to a close one of the most appalling episodes in American political history. The Democrats’ shameful treatment of Robert Bork in 1987 has distorted our politics–not just the politics of the Supreme Court–for the last 30 years. But the slanders the Democratic Party directed toward Kavanaugh were, if anything, even more disgraceful. We will feel their impact for many years to come.

So, looking to the future, what are the notable features of our political landscape?

1) The validation of violence for political ends. This didn’t start with the Kavanaugh nomination. It has been brewing for a while. Barack Obama famously said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Antifa has been taking Obama at his word for some years.

What we are seeing today is mob action by Democratic Party activists: harassing Republicans when they go out to dinner or walk through airports; busing activists to Republicans’ homes to harass them and frighten their children; invading Republican Congressional offices with threatening mobs; and, in some cases, shooting or violently assaulting Republican office-holders. I wrote yesterday about Kellie Paul’s appeal to Cory Booker to withdraw his incitements to violence. Maxine Waters is another prominent Democrat who has endorsed immoral and potentially illegal harassment of Republicans.

Why are Democrats confident that political violence is a one-way street? Conservatives are, on average, better armed than liberals and–I think it is safe to say–more personally formidable. Yet liberals clearly have no fear that conservatives will respond to their violence and mob intimidation in kind. I think that is because they assume we are better than they are. We care about our country, we value its institutions, and we try to maintain the basic presumption of good faith that underlies our democratic system.

The Democrats are right to think that we are better than they are, but conservatives’ patience is not infinite. The potential for significant political violence is higher today than it has been at any time since the Great Depression, and perhaps since the Civil War. The Democrats are sowing the wind, and they may reap the whirlwind.

2) The final discrediting of the liberal media. This is nothing new, of course. But the manner in which the liberal press jumped on board with the absurd allegations against Judge Kavanaugh exposed reporters and editors, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, as nothing more than Democratic Party activists. The press publicized the most absurd fabrications about Kavanaugh as though they were news: He organized gang rapes when he was in high school!

And they solemnly declared Christine Ford to be “credible,” when the facts showed that she had massively changed (i.e., fabricated) her story in collaboration with Democratic Judiciary Committee staffers, and when every witness identified by her repudiated her account. The press elevated a transparent liar to the status of a heroine, for political purposes.

Not to mention the ridiculous hypocrisy of smearing a man with the strongest possible reputation on the basis of an unsupported 36-year-old allegation, dating to high school, while studiously ignoring the far more recent and actually true claims of sexual abuse that have been levied against a succession of Democrats. If you are a Democratic Party reporter–as virtually all of them are–any smear will do, as long as it is directed against a Republican. Otherwise, you avert your eyes.

A lot of voters who are perhaps too young to remember Rathergate learned something about the “mainstream” media in the course of the press’s crazed attacks on Judge Kavanaugh.

3) The yawning chasm between our institutions and our people. Not just the press, but America’s institutions in general disgraced themselves by endorsing the Democratic Party’s absurd smear campaign. Take the American Bar Association–please! The liberal ABA has long been a joke when it comes to politics, but to its credit, its committee on nominations unanimously acknowledged that Brett Kavanaugh is “well qualified” to serve on the Supreme Court, its highest rating. But ABA President Robert Carlson, apparently going rogue, authored an anti-Kavanaugh letter. Within the last few hours, it was reported that the ABA is “re-evaluating” its endorsement of Kavanaugh. Of course it is: the ABA is a Democratic Party tool. I know, I was a member for many years.

Then we have the universities. Again, this is nothing new, but the facts are particularly stark, given the thinness of the Democrats’ attacks on Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh graduated from Yale and Yale Law School, and after an initial expression of support from those who had anything to do with him at Yale Law School, the worm turned. Academics, including those at Yale, pretty much universally joined the Democrats’ lynch party.

And Kavanaugh has been teaching for some years at Harvard Law School at the invitation of former law school dean and now Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. This is because Kavanaugh is universally acknowledged to be a brilliant legal scholar. But 40 Harvard Law professors signed a letter opposing their colleague’s confirmation to the Court, and the law school has announced that Kavanaugh will not be returning as a teacher.

Meanwhile, polls show that most Americans want Kavanaugh to be confirmed. Most people know little about the legal issues that Supreme Court justices address, but they have a basic sense of fairness. It wasn’t hard to see that the Democrats behaved in an outrageous manner, or that Kavanaugh is a brilliant and decent man.

Professors at Harvard Law School, Yale Law School and the like think their opinions should influence the rest of us because they are exceptionally smart and knowledgeable. Does anyone buy that claim anymore? I certainly don’t, and I graduated from Harvard Law School. I agree with Bill Buckley: I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.

4) In that context, Donald Trump is the man of the hour. The incoherent Democrats are reduced to street violence, the press is discredited, our institutions are mostly pathetic. Who benefits? President Donald J. Trump. Trump truly is the man of the hour. Trump has been on to the “fake news” press from the beginning. And if there ever was any fake news, it is Christine Ford’s Democrat-engineered lie. Trump represents normal Americans who didn’t go to Harvard or Yale but have a modicum of common sense, which many professors at those institutions obviously don’t.

Trump nominated a solidly conservative justice to the Supreme Court, and steadfastly stood by him despite the Democrats’ wacko smears. I don’t think the Democrats understand how many millions of people view their smear campaign with contempt, and appreciate President Trump for standing by his nominee.

Who is about to be confirmed. This is a huge victory for those who vote for Republicans but sometimes despair as to whether it does any good. It is victory, not defeat, that motivates voters. Confirmation of a sane, brilliant, non-political justice to to the Supreme Court is a signal victory for normal Americans. And we have Donald J. Trump to thank. His approval rating is surging, as well it should.

I didn’t see this coming two years ago, but President Trump is now the standard-bearer for normal Americans who resist the encroachments of the far Left, which now owns the Democratic Party.

District 33C Receives Grant For Safety And Security

District 33C has received a $500,000 grant for measures to increase safety and security at district schools.

By Andrea Earnest, Patch Staff | Oct 4, 2018 4:22 pm ET | Updated Oct 4, 2018 4:25 pm ET

HOMER GLEN, IL — The Will County Sheriff's Office has announced a $500,000 grant for measures to increase safety and security at all of Homer Community Consolidated School District 33C. The sheriff's office said Homer 33C district staff approached the sheriff's office in early 2017 about an opportunity to receive grant funds through the US Department of Justice, 2018 COPS STOP School Violence Prevention Program.

The sheriff's office said the requirement of the grant was for the school district to approach their law enforcement agency and request collaboration for writing and submitting the grant on their behalf. Homer School contacted Sheriff Mike Kelley who accepted the undertaking.

"Over the past few years, the sheriff's office has increased their commitment to preventing school violence," Kelley said in a release. "School Resource Officers have been in our schools for several years, but with the increase in school violence nationwide, we have made it one of our priorities. We now utilize our Training Division deputies to hold Active Shooter/Rescue Task Force training and other specific training for school personnel. The $500,000 grant funds fall directly in line with our goals and amplify assurance to school personnel, students, parents and visitors."