Communist Teacher Blamed for Improper Cuba Trip - NY Times

The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave shows it's true colors.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/communist-teacher-blamed-for-improper-trip-to-cuba/

After three years of investigation, the New York City special investigator for schools released a report (also see below) on Tuesday about a 2007 spring break trip to Cuba taken by public-school students from selective Beacon High School on the Upper West Side that violated federal restrictions on travel to Cuba.

The report exonerates the school’s principal, Ruth Lacey, and places full blame on the history teacher, Nathan Turner, for organizing the trip on his own. Mr. Turner resigned in 2008, and the report recommended that he should never be permitted to work in city schools again.

Beacon students had gone to Cuba in 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005, apparently with permission from the school and the Department of Education. Gov. David A. Paterson’s stepdaughter went on the 2005 trip, and he had placed a call to school officials in 2007, urging them to approve the trip that year as well.

Mr. Turner now runs a community project based in New Orleans called Our School at Blair Grocery, which works with at-risk youth and teaches them about urban farming, healthy eating, and food justice issues, he said in an interview. He declined to comment about the details of his case.

and punish the teacher.

Who approved it? No way did this teacher organize this on his own.

Nor, did the kids.

But, that begs the question of how free are we in the Land of the Free if our government tells us we can't travel freely?

But no teacher takes any group of students to the corner for ice cream without administrative approval. This trip may have been this teacher's idea but it absolutely had to have been approved by an administrator. And I want to know why that administrator is not being held accountable.

He then went outside the school and organized the trip through a "non-profit religious group" without permission from the Department of Education. That is why he was fired.

Thanks for filling me in.

Here in Canada, we can walk into any travel office and book a trip to Cuba any time we want.

And the irony is, even Sears Travel, an American company offers many packages to Cuba.
http://www.searstravel.ca/sts/ShowDetailContentAction.do?campaign=hotspot_cuba&stsLang=en&utm_source=package_hotspots&utm_medium=package_hotspots&utm_campaign=Cuba

And yet, American careers are ruined, businesses are shut down and people are ATTACKED for merely TRAVELLING to Cuba.

Cuba has a vibrant and flourishing tourist industry, which the rest of the world has been taking advantage of for decades.

This embargo is BEYOND INSANITY.

It always starts - "sure I'm against the Cuba embargo but it's the teacher's fault for breaking the LAW".

As if some law, passed by knee-jerk reaction to the Cuban people's victory against the American stooge Batista and the mafia-run government, should ever be the standard to live by. NOT!

If DU was around in the 1950's the same people would be saying, "I'm against segregation ---, but a teacher working with his/her students to boycott Woolworth's is wrong. The teacher is breaking the LAW."

In April of 1971 as schools across the nation shut down to protest the invasion of Cambodia by US troops and the murder of students and Kent State and Jackson State, the same people would be saying, "I'm against the war too ----, but the teachers that canceled class are preventing final exams and breaking the LAW".

I get so sick and tired of Democrats who can never, ever see that some things are just wrong on every level regardless of the current statutes. Really.

I went through the Bahamas. I brought back some Cuban cigars and U.S. customs didn't care about those (I didn't volunteer where I had gotten them and they didn't ask). The embargo was stupid then and even more stupid now. It is not hard to go to Cuba (through Canada, Mexico or the Bahamas). You just don't tell customs you were in the forbidden country and there is no way they can prove it.