A school board in Pennsylvania has voted to pull a daily on-demand CNN affiliate’s news program from the district’s middle school classrooms.
The Norwin school board voted Monday, by a vote of 5-4, to end mandatory streaming of daily news from CNN 10 to middle school homeroom classrooms.
Instead, classroom televisions will be shut off unless students, teachers, or administrators choose videos concerning American events such as Veterans Day or the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, TribLive reported.
Norwin board directors Christine Baverso, Alexander Detschelt, Shawna Ilagan, Raymond Kocak and Robert Wayman voted to end the CNN broadcast during the homeroom period, while Darlene Ciocca, William Essay, Patrick Lynn and Joanna Jordan opposed the ban.
According to the report, Baverso introduced the motion about ending the mandatory CNN 10 broadcasts because she wanted teachers to use various sources for news on events, while Jordan countered teachers should be allowed to use what is available to them.
Fox News reported a spokesperson for the Norwin School District provided the following statement:
On February 14, 2022 the Norwin School Board voted and approved the following: To remove watching TV during homeroom at the Middle School unless it is either student, teacher or administrator driven to allow students to socialize and interact with each other.
It was further clarified that the board will allow teachers to use discretion and broadcast videos from all sources, including videos pertaining to patriotic holidays.
TribLive further reported:
The banning of CNN 10 from the homeroom classrooms was the first of about a dozen changes that Detschelt characterized in December as issues that were raised in his successful 2021 election campaign. In January, those issues had been elevated to core elements of his political campaign.
In a January report, TribLive observed that Detschelt, a conservative Republican, expressed concern about bias, noting that students were only being exposed to CNN 10 and not other news shows from outlets such as Fox News, One America News (OAN), or Newsmax.
About 30 teachers attended the board meeting during which the vote to end the mandatory CNN 10 streaming took place, including Ryan Lynn, president of the Norwin Education Association.
Parent Ashley Egan noted that CNN 10 continually funnels children toward its parent cable station and online news service with invitations to “visit our friends on CNN.com.”
A daily broadcast of a news program affiliated with CNN, she said, is reinforcing to her son that “CNN is a label you can trust.”
“That is not unbiased,” Egan said, according to TribLive.
– – –
Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Image “No One is Watching in Class” by Unsplash and “Don Lemon Tonight” is by CNN.
