Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Notes on Peer Reviewed Firearm Research

This morning I encountered a note on Facebook:
Just remember the same people complaining about those ignoring experts currently are the same ones that preach gun control and have zero education or experience on the matter.
The hypocrisy is real in the current political climate.
This prompted me to think about the situation and wonder: what is considered to be relevant education or experience on the matter.

I recall having a conversation when I was running for Congress in 2014 was with my daughter's doctor. His response: "I am a children's trauma surgeon in Baltimore. You can probably guess how I feel about gun control."

Does the voice of someone who works to save lives of gunshot victims count as valid education or experience when discussing the legal standing of machines entirely designed to kill?

This note did prompt me to look into peer reviewed articles on firearms. I read three this morning:
  • Simonetti JA, Dorsey Holliman B, Holiday R, Brenner LA, Monteith LL (2020) Firearm-related experiences and perceptions among United States male veterans: A qualitative interview study. PLoS ONE 15(3): e0230135. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230135
  • Bailey HM, Zuo Y, Li F, Min J, Vaddiparti K, Prosperi M, et al. (2019) Changes in patterns of mortality rates and years of life lost due to firearms in the United States, 1999 to 2016: A joinpoint analysis. PLoS ONE 14(11): e0225223. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225223
  • Bilukha, O., Briss, P. A., Corso, P. S., Crosby, A., Fullilove, M. T., Hahn, R. A., ... & Tuma, F. (2003). First reports evaluating the effectiveness of stragegies for preventing violence; early childhood home visitation and firearms laws: findings from the Task Force on Community Preventive Services. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5214a2.htm
And I had three up that I ran out of time to read:

Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Wait for them to count all of the votes

 No matter how the results fall out we can be sure of one thing.

White supremacy and fascism was on the ballot: at least 67 million Americans said Yes to it.

Sunday, March 15, 2020

Leveraging HCPSS Guidance for Children's Education

Howard County Public School System has been a valuable source of information since at least February 27. In fact the oldest email that I have the “COVID-19” phrase is that email: Coronavirus Prevention and Response Measures. The hcpss.org/health/coronavirus page is a wonderful resource.

Multi Language Overview Sheets



Links back to previous Coronavirus Updates

This page caused me to check my email and see that “Coronavirus” was a better search term. That turned up with my oldest emails being from County Executive Ball providing information from the Health Department (Jan 27), HCPSS News - 1/29/20 (Jan 29), and then Coronavirus Update from the Superintendent on Feb 3.

HCPSS has been keeping us informed long before extreme social distancing was being advocated.

Please check out the whole page for sections like FAQs, RESOURCES FOR PARENTS, and GENERAL INFORMATION AND RESOURCES.

What I am finding most useful are the age appropriate assistance for SUPPORTING STUDENTS AT HOME

Elementary



Middle School



High School



My own daughter was quick to notice that documentaries online were on her grade recommendation and has been watching Empire Games on Netflix.

Saturday, February 29, 2020

The Peoples Voice & HCCA Elkridge Forum - Feb 25

Introduction

First, Thank you to the People's Voice and the HCCA for having this forum. I’m Matthew Molyett and I’m running for Board of Education from District 1. It is nice that tonight is in Elkridge. My time with Howard County Schools started out right here as a parent of Ducketts Lane Elementary School. As a father, I am concerned about the long term success and stability of our community schools. These community schools, and the Board of Education, operate on and through numerous broken processes. These are processes that endanger student health, they waste taxpayer dollars, and they compromise the student academic achievement that we send our kids there for. As a local tech professional, identifying, correcting, and optimizing processes is what I do. So tonight I am hoping I can earn your support for Howard County Board of Education from District 1. Thank you very much.

Last year the Board’s proposed budget only reduced the requested budget by a small amount. Hard choices had to be made when it came back from the county. The impacts are still being felt. Would you present an aspirational budget asking for all possible covered needs. If not, why not. What would you prioritize and how in a budget for the county executive. Be as specific as possible.

Let's look at having the timekeeping go on reading the question because we can’t answer something in one minute if it takes that long to convey the problem. That said the school budget needs to accurately reflect the needs that the school has determined along with communicating to the county what is needed by the school system. We need to ensure that it is fully defended when we write down the amount that the school needs. We need to be justifying every line of it. We need to be able to prove that we have reviewed that and ensured that that line is what we need. That there is no way we can better spend the money as a school because we have already addressed that. And then the budget needs to reflect the needs. Thank you.

What do you believe are the positives and negatives of the recent redistricting decision? What would you have done differently, if anything?

The negatives are clear in that it has left the community whiplashed, uncomfortable, and just generally disappointed with the way the process had laid out. Right at the time that the community needed to be providing specific input into how to refine the plan the Board was still attempting to define a plan. The community couldn’t identify what individual small tweaks were needed because there wasn’t a plan. There were two feasibility studies, there were consultants brought in, and then it was all just completely left behind while a handful of board members created… something. Up until the vote was taken you couldn’t see what it was because there wasn’t a plan until then. That process needs to be corrected.


Please share an example of how you have worked collaboratively with people you don’t necessarily agree with.

Professionally I work in computer security. The interactions between security folks and basically everybody else is constantly a battle of disagreements. Every time you worked at a shared building and watched the side door be propped open so people can get through. You are seeing a great example of how security and everyone else don’t get along immediately. The key that ends up happening is that you have to stop and look farther. Look outside your own little bubble at what you are trying to achieve. Security and operations, both are trying to enable whatever the mission is. You gotta look past the immediate and see what the goal is. On the Board of Education, the path forward is to remember that, regardless of what you think about any specific issue or however you feel in a day or toward people, is you need to address keeping students safe, safeguarding taxpayer money, and ensuring student success.


Please explain if you agree or disagree with the recommendations from Kirwan.

When it comes to education policy, the first people we need to be looking at and focusing on are the educators. They are the ones that experience it every day. So we should be following their direction and coming up with “what is an education policy that works and will work for the school?” What I have seen of Kirwan is that, statewide, across the board, the pressure behind it, it is being supported by the educators and I think we should listen to the educators about how to educate. What has the school board done to guarantee redistricted children who need before and after school programs will receive bus transportation to school and home? The question is about how to equitably meet the needs of our students. It's drawing directly into the issue that we already aren’t. Access to school and access from school is currently provided to the general population by the buses that say when they are leaving home and when they get back. If there is any variation to what they need to that the school doesn’t meet it. It doesn’t provide it. It is on the parents now and post-redistricting its still on the parents. The after school programs that the school might provide or that Parks and Rec provide are simply not available to students that need to get home after that if the parents can’t meet it. Coming up with a solution for that is a way to provide equitably for the needs of our student body.


What is your opinion on the presence of guns in schools and does their presence serve to increase security?

She went ahead and reminded you that security people and people trying to get through the doors... do not agree. To the question, no. Our students at school should have no exposure to firearms that are not pre-planned through a curriculum, if that is decided. They are traumatic, they are developed for killing people, and no. They should not be in our schools.


How will you work with a state delegation and county council that are over eager to legislate and remove local control from the Board of Education?

I will work closely with our state delegation to ensure they are aware of the needs that they can go to Annapolis and ensure that the state funding is there to help us out. The behaviors of Annapolis don’t just take away control or reshape the school district, they fund our education. When local control was taken away, from Annapolis, our local delegation took that back. It removed the state level mandate on the calendar to provide local control.


What is your one decision you believe the current Board of Education got right?

The superintendent, this last cycle, negotiated an increase with the teachers and that wasn’t a line that the school board cut. The Board of Education chose to fund and support our teaching staff.


What type of involvement do you currently have with the PTA and/or BOE?

Currently I am a paid member of two separate PTAs that my students, my children, attend. That has been a priority for me since the first one went to kindergarten. Regardless of how much time I’ve been able to allocate or set up for it, sign up for it early sign up for it every year. The PTAs need the community’s support. They need some funding to be able to provide the services that they have. I have just recently attended a fantastic presentation that Dunloggin Middle School put on about keeping our kids safe online. The PTA bringing in resources like that to the parents and community are a real asset.


What are your solutions to the perpetual school overcrowding issues that plague our schools, especially in the Route 1 corridor?

The Board, itself, every-time it is looking at the numbers of student capacity needs to approach this problem, every-time, with an empathetic feeling toward what the student experience in life is like. Have you ever thought about going to the mall and then realized it is the week before Christmas and you don’t want to be a part of that? That's what our students go to at Howard and Centennial every day. Instead of adjusting the balance and planning for that we take away green space, we take away parking lots, to add more classrooms which, in turn, allows more students to show up to the same building which increases those crowds. That anxiety, that feeling, that they are getting everytime they are in those crowds that is the environment we expect them to be able to learn in.


Do you have any ideas on how to improve discipline in elementary schools?

The students need to be invested and their teachers need to be supported. It has come up a couple times today: local control, local control. Enable the principals to keep the teachers feeling supported. Keep the teachers and the students supported with therapists and guidance counselors. Make sure that everyone is ready to learn and go through class. Hungry kids are not invested in the day and so we need addressing food insecurity issues that could lead to discipline problems. If they are getting on the bus before they are hungry enough to eat breakfast then they are hungry before lunch. We need to ensure that our school schedules fit the students.


What is your plan for narrowing the socio-economic and racial opportunity gap in Howard County schools?

My proven approach to addressing problem solving, professionally, is rapid iterative prototyping. Find out what the problem is, make a change, be able to see the impact of that change, and then make your next one. We need to be able to properly identify what is the state of the opportunity and achievement gap right now. We need a system in place to collect that data as quickly as we can and be able to process it to identify what has just worked and what hasn't. Then make adjustments. The teaching staff needs to be made to represent the student body and that requires configuring our recruitment, hiring, and retention policies.


Whose voice is most important: staff, students, or parents? How will you represent that voice?

I agree. All the voices are important and the context of the discussion matters. We’re not going to poll the kindergartners about whether we have the appropriate high school sports. When a question impacts a population, that is when we must be listening to that population. If the high schoolers are telling us that they are not being provided a challenge, we figure out how to meet that. If the parents are telling us that the schedules and the transportation is not working for their family, we figure out a way to meet that need. When the staff isn’t being met by the building or their pay, we figure out a way to meet that need.


Closing

Thank you for coming out. Thank you for The People’s Voice and HCCA for having this forum. I want to make sure that the Board keeps a direction focused on three principles. We need to protect and ensure the safety and mental health of our students. We need to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollars. We need to maximize our students academic achievement. I’m Matthew Molyett. I hope you have heard enough to support me for Howard County Board of Education.

Saturday, February 1, 2020

IONHoCo meeting of Unity through Islamophobia

Tonight the Indian Origin Network of Howard County held a hearing session. Below is how the event was promoted.

“Recent events such as a student organization led event at Centennial High school has renewed the discussion between freedom of speech and profiling based on religion and ethnicity. This meet is to bring everyone to the table and hear each others perspectives.
Please join us on Saturday Feb 1st from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM.for a better understanding of issues such as CAA, NRC, religious shift in South Asian Countries, freedom of speech and other related topics. Please let us know if you like to speak for up to three minutes on any of these topics at the forum.”  

The first speaker began with the intention of laying groundwork to discuss the CAA as an effort to assist persecuted religious minorities in surrounding countries. He discussed vast decreases in the non-Muslim populations in those countries since 1947 and offered the CAA as a protective remedy against persecution. He described this being an area of concern since as early as the 1950’s.

Next up was a presenter with a supporting slide deck who was having trouble getting the projector to work. While the projector issues were resolved, he was replaced by the next speaker. This was where the hearing session went sideways. Instead of addressing the concerns raised by the Muslim Student Association or addressing the concerns raised by IONHoCo about whether the students were acting inappropriately at school, he instead was speaking to why India should be seeking to limit the influence or even population of Muslims. He spoke in graphic terms about how the partition of India by the British was damaging to the Indian people and equated the partition to having limbs severed. He blamed that history on Muslims as a class, and further called out the remaining Muslim population as unwelcome. Every possible concern of anti-Muslim hatred was legitimized by this speaker.

It was at this point I began to feel relief that the Centennial MSA members had not accepted the invitation to be a part of this gathering. They did not need to have a grown adult look at them and say that if people sharing their religion wanted to live in a country then f*ck them.

A library employee had come into the room and got the projector set up so the skipped speaker could present. Like the first presenter he was lobbying in support of the CAA. I noticed he used a lot of orange and green color scheme in his slides, which the IONHoCo uses as well in their logo, and which the flag of India uses. Around this time it was mentioned, I think by an audience member, that the MSA invoking green and orange meant they “were bringing religion into it.”

Comment: I would have thought that religion was sufficiently brought into it when a student organization was attempting to bring awareness to a foreign law for being damaging to a religious group on the basis of their religion.

... The Centennial High School Muslim Students Association has asked students to wear green and orange in support of Indian Muslims, to bring awareness to a citizenship bill in India that has been categorized as Islamophobic …
Description of the event from Howard County Muslim Council

Later it was described that the color to religion association was green for Islam and orange for Hindu. I can’t speak to the intentions of the organizing students as to whether they were meaning to assign any meaning beyond just that orange and green are the colors of the Indian flag.

The evening continued with more speakers speaking not to the awareness campaign, but to the dangers from Islam. Some provided anecdotes about specific acts of violence that have occurred with Muslim perpetrators as justification of broad Islamophobia. One speaker expressed intolerance of the mere word Islamophobia based on her families’ personal history of violence in Kashmir.

Her discussion of the elimination of indigenous Kashmiri Hindus resonated with me, something I brought up when I spoke. She explained that at one time ethnic Kashmiri made up 100% of the population and that they now make up a small minority before blaming that change on all Islam.

I took the floor to address that the hearing had derailed into Islamophobia and that some of the speakers had attributed to Muslims what was better described as the result of empire. I couldn't sit silently through such an event when I was in photos and videos. To do so would have been implicit agreement.

What she described is an all too common pattern that we observe in the post-empire fallout. Canada, United States, Australia: an aspect of the British Empire is decimation of the indigenous population. Another pattern that has played out repeatedly following the British Empire has been a society of apartheid. United States and its criminalization of black people. South Africa and its criminalization of black people. Israel and its ongoing criminalization of Palestinian Muslim people. History supports the concern that a recently freed country following British subjugation will resort to apartheid.

“As educators, we are constantly seeking balance between allowing for healthy student expression and providing structure, guidance, and even limitations for our students. As Principal, I believe in working alongside students to cultivate a sense of voice and empowerment while also helping them understand that their words and actions can cause a reaction in their peers and neighbors. Often, this reaction is one in which they weren't expecting or agree with. That is all part of the learning process and an effort to prepare them for life once they leave the accepting and supportive confines of Centennial High School and Howard County.”
-text attributed by a third party to the CHS Principal

The cherry on top of this Islam hating sundae of a hearing would have to be right at the end when the gathering questioned, to broad support, why a Muslim Student Association would even exist in school. The obvious response is that a Muslim student body exists.

I am running for Howard County Board of Education and as such it is in the public interest to know where I stand on incidents such as the initiating awareness campaign. First off, let me acknowledge that Tinker v. Des Moines, 1969, takes the decision out of the hands of the board. Second of all, I applaud the school district for helping train students to perform civics and not just read about it. Finally, Tinker v. Des Moines.