More things to protect children from: Texas style

First it's the Veggies, whose proselytizing NBC deems to dangerous to air (unless on Sunday--did anyone SEE the show before getting the air rights?!?), now it's trips to the art museum. This strikes home as Izzy's field (DWEM) has lots of inflammatory statuary.

From the NY Times:

FRISCO, Tex., Sept. 28: "Keep the 'Art' in 'Smart' and 'Heart,'" Sydney McGee had posted on her Web site (gone) at Wilma Fisher Elementary School in this moneyed boomtown that is gobbling up the farm fields north of Dallas.

But Ms. McGee, 51, a popular art teacher with 28 years in the classroom, is out of a job after leading her fifth-grade classes last April through the Dallas Museum of Art. One of her students saw nude art in the museum, and after the child's parent complained, the teacher was suspended.

Although the tour had been approved by the principal, and the 89 students were accompanied by 4 other teachers, at least 12 parents and a museum docent, Ms. McGee said, she was called to the principal the next day and "bashed."

She later received a memorandum in which the principal, Nancy Lawson, wrote: "During a study trip that you planned for fifth graders, students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations." It cited additional complaints, which Ms. McGee has challenged.
...
Over the past decade, more than half a million students, including about a thousand from other Frisco schools, have toured the museum's collection of 26,000 works spanning 5,000 years, he said, "without a single complaint." One school recently did cancel a scheduled visit, he said. He did not have its name.

The uproar has swamped Frisco school switchboards and prompted some Dallas-area television stations to broadcast images of statues from the museum with areas of the anatomy blacked out.
...
Retracing her route this week through the museum's European and contemporary galleries, Ms. McGee passed the marble torso of a Greek youth from a funerary relief, circa 330 B.C.; its label reads, "his nude body has the radiant purity of an athlete in his prime." She passed sculptor Auguste Rodin's tormented "Shade;" Aristide Maillol;s "Flora," with her clingy sheer garment; and Jean Arp's "Star in a Dream." None, Ms. McGee said, seemed offensive.

"This is very painful and getting more so," she said, her eyes moistening. "I'm so into art. I look at it for its value, what each civilization has left behind." School officials have not named the child who complained or any particular artwork at issue, although Ms. McGee said her puzzlement was compounded when Ms. Lawson referred at times to "an abstract nude sculpture."
...
Some parents have come to Ms. McGee's defense...Another parent, Maijken Kozcara, said Ms. McGee had taught her children effectively. "I thought she was the greatest," Ms. Kozcara said. But "knowing Texas, the way things work here" she said of the teacher's suspension, "I wasn't really amazed. I was like, 'Yeah, right.'"

Like yeah, right indeed. Gotta love close-minded Texans.

Note: A senior branch of the O'Cayce's lived for several years in nearby Little Elm, TX. We would drive through Frisco on the way to see them--nothing but a few houses with large porches and a feed store. With the suburbs come the suburbanites.