About 14% of all U.S. high school students — and 3% of all middle school students — used an e-cigarette in 2022, according to the Center for Disease Control.
A 2021 CDC study found that 11% of New York City high schoolers were using e-vapor products at the time.mariiya – stock.adobe.comMore school districts are using technology that detects chemicals from e-cigarettes and notifies school staff.Daisy Daisy – stock.adobe.com
A 2021 CDC study found that 11% of New York City high schoolers were using e-vapor products at the time.
Although the DOE has yet to sign off on any contracts, the agency is reviewing products offered by at least one vendor, sources told The Post.
The products rely on wireless service to detect emissions from vaping pens and then immediately alert appropriate personnel.
Sensors can detect vaping and other harmful behavior in schools.tritonsensors.comE-cigarette consumption in New York City schools has climbed in recent years.Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images
“We sent two of our devices to the NYC DOE for evaluation,” said Garrison Parthemore, co-founder of Pennsylvania-based supplier Triton Sensors. “They had the devices for a few months now, and I think they are trying to pick a product to purchase.”
Some city public schools have also directly requested product information from Triton, which already supplies its sensors to five other school districts statewide, he added.
Sotor Technologies, a Ronkonkoma, N.Y.-based company that provides its FlySense 286 sensors to six charter and private schools in the Big Apple and at four school districts statewide, is also pushing to get its product in NYC schools, calling vaping in schools “a plague.”
There’s no question students face mounting challenges as they head back to classrooms across the country this month. But are COVID-era school closures solely to blame?
The answer is a resounding no.
The lagging test scores and reading delays that have been widely reported over the past few months stem from much more than simply misguided COVID policies.
A new report from the National Opportunity Project reveals that school districts across America – in red and blue states alike – are now considering teachers’ social and political views alongside instructional qualifications during the hiring process.
This means that if the teacher at the head of your kid’s classroom was hired in recent years, there’s a strong chance he or she was chosen not for their credentials — but because they passed an ideological litmus test.
The National Opportunity Project surveyed more than 70 school districts across America over the past year about their hiring protocols.
They also reviewed district hiring documents such as applications, interview questions, and candidate evaluation rubrics.
New research makes clear that public school districts nationwide are prioritizing adherence to woke ideologies when determining who can teach our children.Shutterstock
Here is what NOP found: Applicants in the Denver Public School system for an elementary art teacher position must: “Lead for racial and educational excellence and work to dismantle systems of oppression and inequity in our community…”
In Georgia, City Schools of Decatur require hiring teams to be staffed for racial and gender equity by “ensur[ing] that there is at least one person of color and one woman or gender-fluid individual on the interview panel. Individuals who embody other aspects of diversity should be included as well.”
Since when were these characteristics needed to determine who should be teaching our kids?
Indeed, more than one-third of the school districts that responded to NOP’s request for transparency around their hiring practice revealed protocols that are clearly based on ideological bias.
What’s the reason for all this? As the old adage goes, “Personnel is policy.”
The people behind these policies aim to change the culture of public schools by only hiring staff who adhere to their political and ideological viewpoints.
They inform every element of the public school experience, including who gets to stand at the head of the classroom.
It’s no wonder far-left political viewpoints now course through much of America’s public school systems; the application process is designed to weed out anyone who thinks differently or is independent-minded.
The National Opportunity Project found that the same schools giving preference to teachers with certain political and social views are adopting other divisive, and sometimes illegal, policies, as well.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, applicants to the public school district are asked, “What does equity mean to you? How do you plan to keep equity at the center of your classroom?” Responses that show strong agreement with DEI concepts such as “equity journey,” “equity work,” and “understanding that race is a social construct” are rated more highly on a scoring rubric.
However, not everyone in Fairfax County thinks this type of discrimination is acceptable.
The school district is facing a federal lawsuit for adopting race-based admissions to its selective math and science magnet school.
In neighboring Loudoun County, Virginia, applicants for teaching positions are asked: “How would race and diversity impact your classroom?”
In the meantime, the Loudoun County Public Schools have faced multiple lawsuits for racial and viewpoint discrimination and bias against a teacher and students in recent years.
In Evanston, a large suburb outside Chicago, the local high school district has highlighted its commitment to “anti-racism” since at least 2020.
The National Opportunity Project’s investigation found that candidates for teaching positions must “demonstrate a commitment to social justice, equity, excellence and high expectations for all students.”
The district’s equity pledge even spurred the creation of Advanced Placement Calculus classes segregated by race.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been such an outspoken critic of DEI in public schools that he initiated legislation to outlaw it.Governor DeSantis
When it comes to our kids, they need the best and brightest teachers by their side – not people who pass a political litmus test.
As the gaping holes caused by COVID-era closures confirm, American students are struggling to catch up in the classroom and prepare for life after graduation.
School hiring policies should be focused on putting the most qualified adults in front of students, no matter their race, their personal political beliefs, or their point of view on the news of the day.
Our students demand it — and deserve nothing less.
Patrick Hughes is the founder and president of the National Opportunity Project, a nonprofit government watchdog and education organization.
Meanwhile, a group of angry moms will lead a protest march against the skin merchants on Sunday.
The stretch of Roosevelt Avenue in Corona was featured twice over the last monthon “The NYC Walking Show,” a channel that offers first-person tours of iconic Big Apple neighborhoods and attractions such as Yankee Stadium and Times Square.
The 32-minute clip first posted on Aug. 20 features scantily-clad women soliciting outside storefronts and massage parlors, and has already amassed more than 636,000 views.
A second video was posted Saturday showing the seedy stretch at night.
“It just shocked me what’s happening in the broad daylight,” said Sifat Razwan, the YouTuber behind the channel. “It’s even more severe than in the day.”
“On the other hand it very really eye-opening that this is what actually happens outside all those glamorous parts of New York,” added Razwan, 24, of Jamaica, Queens.
A group of concerned mothers plan to march through Queens Sunday to urge lawmakers to clean up the neighborhood.J.C. Rice
Local moms are mobilizing to push the city to shut down the brothels — which have, except one, all continued to operate since The Post’s July 29 cover story.
“We are going to keep fighting because we are very worried about what children face now,” said Guadalupe Aguirre Gomez, the coordinator of Community of Young Values and Principles who will be among those leading the march that begins Sept. 10 at 11 a.m. at the post office at 37th Avenue and 78th Street in Jackson Heights and ends at Corona Plaza.
“Queens is known as the prostitution county,” she said.
Mayor Eric Adams said days after the Post expose that he toured the area and was “putting in place an operation to deal with the sex workers.”
Guadalupe Aguirre Gomez, the coordinator of Community of Young Values and Principles, and local mothers will be marching Sunday to urge authorities to clean up the neighborhood.Kevin C. Downs for NY PostThe NYC Walking Show recently posted two virtual tours walking down Roosevelt Ave — during the day and one at night.Youtube The NYC Walking Show
But in the month following that statement, just one brothel was shut down by the Queens District Attorney’s Office compared to six in two months before.
“In the last three or so months I’ve heard [about prostitution] more than I ever have,” said Queens Community Board 4 District Manager Christian Cassagnol. “In the 20 years I have been doing this, prostitution was never this big of a factor.”
President Joe Biden's administration took its battle to preserve broad access to the abortion pill mifepristone to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday as it appealed a lower court's ruling that would curb how the drug is delivered and distributed.
The Justice Department said it filed its appeal of an August decision by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that would bar telemedicine prescriptions and shipments of mifepristone by mail. The drug's manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, also said it filed its appeal on Friday.
The 5th Circuit's decision is currently on hold pending the outcome of the administration's appeal at the Supreme Court.
The Justice Department in its filing said that allowing the 5th Circuit's restrictions to take effect would have "damaging consequences for women seeking lawful abortions and a healthcare system that relies on the availability of the drug under the current conditions of use."
The case could put at risk the authority of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency that signs off on the safety of food products, drugs and medical devices. The FDA approved mifepristone in 2000.
In its filing, Danco's attorney Jessica Ellsworth said the 5th Circuit upended the approved conditions for use of Danco's drug, called Mifeprex, "at the request of a group of plaintiffs who do not prescribe or use the drug and whose real disagreement with FDA is that they oppose all forms of abortion."
If the justices decide to take up the case, they could hear arguments in their next term, which begins in October, and issue a ruling by the end of June 2024.
The 5th Circuit's decision partially sided with the anti-abortion groups and doctors who challenged mifepristone. It did not go as far as a prior decision by U.S. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, that would have suspended FDA approval of mifepristone and effectively pulled it off the market.
In April, the Supreme Court granted emergency requests by the Justice Department and the pill's manufacturer Danco Laboratories to put on hold Kacsmaryk's order while litigation continued.
Biden's administration is seeking to defend mifepristone in the face of mounting abortion bans and restrictions enacted by Republican-led states since the Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized the procedure nationwide.
Mifepristone is taken with another drug called misoprostol to perform medication abortion, which accounts for more than half of all U.S. abortions. The drug has other uses including management of miscarriages. The FDA has called mifepristone safe and effective as demonstrated over decades of use by millions of Americans, with adverse effects exceedingly rare.
Anti-abortion groups led by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and four anti-abortion doctors sued the FDA last year. The challengers, represented by the conservative religious rights group Alliance Defending Freedom, contend that the FDA illegally approved mifepristone and then removed critical safeguards on what they call a dangerous drug.
The 5th Circuit's August decision rolled back FDA actions that had made the drug easier to access in recent years, including a 2021 decision allowing the drug to be prescribed remotely and sent by mail, instead of requiring an in-person doctor visit, and a 2016 decision to allow mifepristone to be used to 10 weeks of pregnancy, up from seven.
Since last year's Supreme Court decision, at least 14 U.S. states have put in place outright abortion bans while many others prohibit abortion after a certain length of pregnancy.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease leading to an impaired glucose metabolism and requires life-long administration of insulin. While the cause of the autoimmunity reaction is still unclear, viral infections in young children are proposed to be critical environmental factors leading to type 1 diabetes.
An international team of researchers from the Global Platform for the Prevention of Autoimmune Diabetes (GPPAD) now reports an increase in the incidence ofisletautoimmunity in youngchildrenwith agenetic riskfor type 1 diabetes who had a SARS-CoV-2infection. The findings were published in the journalJAMA.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. In this condition, the immune system reacts against and eventually destroys islet beta cells in the pancreas. These cells are responsible for producing insulin, a hormone that is vital for regulating glucose levels and for maintaining the body's energy requirements.
Both genetic and environmental factors are involved in the pathogenesis of the autoimmunity with viral infections being one of the factors thought to increase the risk of developing type 1 diabetes. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an increase in the incidence of type 1 diabetes. However, it was not clear if this was due to a SARS-CoV-2 infection and if infection led to an increase in islet autoimmunity.
"We had a chance to follow children from the Primary Oral Insulin Trial (POInT) and link the timing of SARS-CoV-2 infection to the appearance of islet autoantibodies," explains Marija Lugar from the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) and Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus at TUD Dresden University of Technology, the author of the study.
POInT is a study conducted in Germany, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, and the UK. It is led by Prof. Anette-Gabriele Ziegler from Helmholtz Munich Institute of Diabetes Research and the Technical University of Munich School of Medicine. POInT recruited babies from 2018 to 2021 with a genetically defined risk for developing islet autoantibodies of at least 10%.
Autoantibodies against pancreatic islets are the first sign of type 1 diabetes and indicate the start of the disease. To establish if SARS-CoV-2 infection influenced the development of early signs of type 1 diabetes, the researchers tested for islet autoantibodies and SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in two to six-month intervals from age 4 to 24 months in 885 children.
170, or almost 20% of these children, developed antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 during the pandemic indicating that they had been infected with the virus. The frequency of children who developed islet autoantibodies was over twice as high in children who had a SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to those without the infection.
"The timing of the islet autoantibody appearance in relation to the SARS-CoV-2 infection in these children was striking. The most remarkable finding, however, was that the risk of developing islet autoantibodies was highest in the children who were infected before they were 18 months old, and in particular at around one year of age," explains Prof. Ezio Bonifacio, research group leader at the CRTD and senior author of the study.
"These children had around 5- to 10-fold higher risk for developing islet autoantibodies that lead to type 1 diabetes later in life. It is such a critical age for children who are genetically at risk for the disease and key to why we were able to see the association."
Prior studies had found a correlation between type 1 diabetes incidence and COVID-19 diagnosis, but this is the first to associate SARS-CoV-2 infection with the start of islet autoimmunity.
It is important to note that although there was a clear temporal association between SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of islet autoantibodies, many children developed islet autoantibodies without COVID-19.
"Type 1 diabetes is not a one-factor disease," says Ezio Bonifacio. "However, this study again shows the link between a virus infection and type 1 diabetes right at the very start of the process and at the critical age of susceptibility."
Although the exact mechanism behind the increased risk for islet autoimmunity in young children is unknown, the findings may help find ways to prevent type 1 diabetes.
"Since there is a vaccine available, it begs the question as to whether vaccination against viruses associated with islet autoimmunity could be an avenue for prevention of at least some cases of type 1 diabetes," says Anette-Gabriele Ziegler. "Type 1 diabetes is a lifelong disease affecting millions of children and adults worldwide. We are convinced that investing into early prevention strategies such as those tested in GPPAD, is important to curtail the rising incidence of this disease in children."
