A number of school teachers in Rutherford County took advantage of a public comment form in order to speak out against what would be a competing charter school in the county.
In the open public comments, 255 of 311 comments were in favor of Rutherford County Schools, meaning that about four in five of the commenters said they did not want the American Classical Academy, a Hillsdale College affiliated school, to open in the county.
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Three Tennessee school boards denied the application of the American Classical Academy, a K-12 charter school system affiliated with Hillsdale College that provides students with a classic liberal arts education. The American Classical Academy alleges that these decisions are politically motivated and based on its ties to Hillsdale, which is Christian and conservative, as well as comments made by Hillsdale’s president, Larry Arnn.
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Whether you believe we do, or do not, the fact of the matter is that our Governor & legislature have made it clear that they do, and most parents have made it clear they want more “school choice” for their children.
My name is Tammy Sharp, and I am the Rutherford County Zone 1 school board member. I am completing my first 4-year term on the board, and am unopposed on the August 4th ballot. This zone I very proudly serve, represents a large part of Smyrna and Lavergne on the east side of interstate 24. Eleven of its 13 schools are Title 1 schools.
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Programming at Hillsdale College’s new Blake Center for Faith and Freedom in Somers, Connecticut is scheduled to start this spring.
In 2019, the late Friendly’s Ice Cream co-founder S. Prestley “Pres” Blake and his wife Helen offered their property at 732 Hall Hill Rd., along with $25 million, to the Michigan-based Christian college to establish an educational center consistent with the values of the school. Their now-repurposed home is modeled after Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and sits on about 100 verdant acres.
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by Jenna Suchyta I am tired of hearing Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission hailed as a “victory” for religious liberty; it was no such thing—unless we’re also going to start counting forfeits and rain delays as wins. Masterpiece was a bunt, and not a very promising one at that. Although the outcome of the decision was in favor of Jack Phillips, the Christian baker in Colorado who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, the reasoning of the decision was mostly based on the hostility that Phillips faced from the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. If proponents of religious liberty unwittingly allow this false sense of security to pervade their thinking, they run the risk of being caught by surprise in later cases, like this one in Michigan to be discussed later. In the Masterpiece case, the Supreme Court very clearly refused to make a ruling on religious exemptions to discrimination law and public accommodations law. “The delicate question,” Justice Kennedy writes in the majority opinion, “of when the free exercise of his religion must yield to an otherwise valid exercise of state power needed to be determined in an adjudication in which religious hostility on the part of the State itself would not be a…
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