Long Week in the Carolinas

March 31: a University of South Carolina student assumed the car that pulled up in front of a bar at 2 am was her Uber driver. She was very wrong.

March 31: Why are NC Republicans so fetishistic about charter schools?

For the girls at Charter Day School, a tuition-free charter school of 900 students in Leland, N.C., near Wilmington, the issue was equality. Girls were required to wear skirts, jumpers or skorts, which look like a skirt but include shorts-like fabric underneath. Boys, on the other hand, were required to wear pants or shorts.

Keely Burks, one of the students involved, was in eighth grade when the American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit on behalf of the girls and their guardians in 2016.

In a blog post at the time, she described how “distracting and uncomfortable” it was to have to pay attention to the position of her legs while sitting in class. She recalled when, in first grade, she and other girls were told by a teacher that they could not sit “crisscross applesauce” like the boys, but instead had to sit on the floor with their legs curled to the side.

She said in the post that she and her friends started a petition that garnered more than 100 signatures before it was confiscated by a teacher.

“Personally, I hate wearing skirts,” Keely wrote. “Even with tights and leggings, skirts are cold to wear in the winter, and they’re not as comfortable as shorts in the summer.”

If it were up to her, she wrote, she would wear pants or shorts every day to school. While some of her peers may still want to wear skirts, she said, “we should have a choice.”

The policy prohibiting girls from wearing pants or shorts was part of Charter Day School’s overall approach emphasizing “traditional values” in education, the judge summarized in his ruling. The school’s handbook said the dress code was in place to “instill discipline,” “promote a sense of pride and of team spirit” and reflect the standards of parents who choose to send their children to the school.

The school, which opened in 2000, aimed to foster a culture that preserved “chivalry and respect” among students, Baker Mitchell, the founder of the company that oversees Charter Day and other schools in southeastern North Carolina, wrote in an email to a parent about the uniform policy in 2015.

“The uniform policy seeks to establish an environment in which our young men and women treat one another with mutual respect,” he wrote, according to the email exchange, which was included in court documents.

March 31: Miss Lindsey launched a twenty-month fan-dance cabaret act for an audience of one. 

April 2: NC GOP Labor Commissioner Cherie Berry, who never managed to repeal the state minimum wage and issued a 2016 guidance memo that people who couldn't get to work because of a hurricane could legally be fired under the Tar  Hell State's right to work law, says she will not seek a sixth term in the service of business.

Berry, whose empire extends to many obscure niches of Carolina life, has become known as the Elevator Lady since she altered inspection certificates in every one of the state's elevators to include her photo and name in 2005.

In 2016, The Washington Post did a study of election results and found Berry's tax-paid campaign fliers pushed up her vote over that of other GOP candidates in more liberal NC counties where tall buildings- and more elevators- are.

Unlike the Queen of England, whose pictures on coins have been gently updated over her 67-year reign, Berry is forever the ingenue of 2005. She will now fade into obscurity, being confused in the grocery with the old lady on the Great British Baking Show.

*****

Dallas the Psychic

April 2: NCGOP is on a roll. Fresh off their triumphant cliff-dive in the 9th district congressional race, the party chair and its biggest sugar daddy have been indicted for trying to bribe the state insurance commissioner- another Republican.

WRAL-TV reports, "Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse tweeted moments ago that the party is aware "of the developments today in Charlotte" and will respond soon."

April 2: SC Attorney General Alan Wilson is high on life, as the evangelical killjoys say: 

In the Statehouse lobby, Wilson said of the medicine, “They use words like stoned, high, wasted, baked, fried, cooked, chonged, cheeched, dope-faced, blazed, blitzed, blunted, blasted, danked, stupid, wrecked — and that’s only half the words they use. Are these consistent with something that describes a medicine?”

What do they call an Oxycontin high?

April 2: In the NCGOP, scratch an evangelical pastor-turned-pol, and a scandal billows out.