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Sept. 30, 2023 - Blood Money
56:28
Blood Money Episode 23 - Paul White "Fighting to protect our children and save our schools"
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Blood Money, episode 23.
Paul White discusses fighting to protect our children and save our schools.
Hi there. We're on the next episode of Blood Money, Blood Money, episode 23.
Today we have a very special guest, Paul White.
Paul, how are you doing today? Real well, then.
Yeah, thank you for coming on our show.
So, Paul, just kind of diving into what's been going on.
Your background is in education and, you know, just a quick bit about what you do for the viewer.
You essentially help to fix up schools that have serious problems and Your background states that you've had a history in helping some of these most troubled schools.
Could you tell us a little bit more about how you got started in this and what your experiences have dictated thus far?
Sure. When I got into teaching decades ago, I found that so many of the kids had not had good parenting and good homes like I was blessed to grow up in.
If the school wasn't going to help them make up the difference, it wasn't going to happen.
So that kind of the ones who were struggling with more stuff were the ones I became interested in lately with parenting kind of collapsing.
That's pretty much all kids.
So I've just always worked in all different situations, kindergarten through 12th grade and even adults, in helping people...
Helping them learn what they need to learn and get rid of the behaviors that get in the way and add the behaviors that help and support them.
I mean, I've turned around 15 schools in about 10 different districts over a period of decades, and the long-range results of these kids has been wonderful.
So that's what I do, and I'm doing it today because our schools have never been more messed up than they are right here in Nevada, and we're starting there.
You had your start in Los Angeles?
No, actually, I started in Detroit.
That's where I was raised. And then we moved to California, and I got going there, several places in California, from north to south.
And I've just always, you know, in Los Angeles especially, there's no shortage with about 75,000 gang members.
Many other issues, too.
There was no shortages of opportunities, so I got a storefront school going there through LA County, a public school, and did great things.
It changed a lot of lives.
I mean, you're walking into these schools that have, like, serious gang problems.
I mean, how does one go into a situation like that where these kids are acting up and they're being violent, and how do you set something like that straight?
Well, the kids have never had any parameters or any lines drawn by anybody who really cared about them.
So, for example, I asked for and got the worst school in San Francisco some years ago, Petrero Hill Middle School.
And I went in there, and the first day I had an assembly, I had all the kids there, and Petrero was known as any of the kids in the district needed to expel and get rid of and couldn't, they sent them there.
So this was 600 of about the worst of the worst.
And I simply sat there.
First thing I did, I lived about a block away from school and I gave them all my personal phone number.
All the students.
Anytime they needed something, they were not a bother.
They were the reason I had a job.
And I told them we weren't going to be a disgrace anymore.
And that anybody who wanted to change, stay there.
Anybody who didn't, come see me after the assembly.
I'd get them transferred somewhere.
And off we went.
And I had... I had probably a kid fight me once a day or twice a day for about two, three weeks.
Like physicals? Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. Physical fights.
Wow. Oh, yeah. Major, major assaults.
So are you trained to protect yourself?
I mean, you're going into situations with gang members assaulting you.
I mean, how does that work?
Oh, not in the least. You know...
Gangs, there's kind of like the abominable snowman and the Easter Bunny and the hardness of gangs.
In prison, where they're not getting drugs so much and they're healthier, it's a different story.
But on the street, the kids who get into your gangs usually, they're not the middle linebacker on the football team.
They're kids who have got nowhere to bond, nothing to bond with.
So they've bonded with other kids who just feel like total losers.
The only time they're a handful is when they're full of drugs, which increasingly is more and more.
But I went to help a class one day in that school, and we were getting it under control, and a teacher called down 911.
The kid's holding the whole class hostage.
Long story short, I went down there real carefully, talked to the kid, come on, out of the room, come down to my office.
Never underestimate your opponent.
Next thing I knew, the kid turned on me, grabbed my tie, had my head under their arm, punching me in the face, spitting on me.
When I finally got him under control, my shirt was torn, and we went down there.
It was a girl. Wow.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is so...
The crazy ones get crazy.
But no, you don't put them under control...
Because you're some martial arts specialist.
I'm sure not. You get them under control because what you're doing is the right thing.
You're willing to stand up for it.
And they come to respect that.
And they don't want to do what they're doing.
They want a good life. Nobody's cared enough to get in the way and stop them.
Wow. Wow. I mean, like, waking up in the morning...
When you're going to go to work and there's a chance that you might be violently assaulted, I mean, what drives you to keep doing this?
Well, about, oh gosh, it'll be close to 20 years ago.
One of my boys stepped outside the storefront school to get a ride home with his parents and unfortunately he was still looking like a gangster.
And a car pulled up on him, looking for somebody else, mistook him for another one, shot him point blank.
He ran up the stairs and he died in my arms.
Oh, wow. And, yeah, it's the worst phone call you ever make to a parent saying, Hello, Mr.
and Mrs. Michael's dead.
Wow. And so the TV cameras, of course, wanted to cover the shooting.
And I had a sign held up with my personal phone on it.
And I went on TV and I said, I was speaking to all the 75,000 gang members in LA. I wanted every one of them to call me and let me help them get them out of here before they destroy their lives.
And after they filmed that, the interviewer, a well-known guy in LA named Warren Wilson, he said, well, Paul, why would you do that?
He says, couldn't that be dangerous if they have your phone or find out where you live or something?
And I asked him, I said, well, Warren, do you have any kids?
And he said, yeah, I got two boys.
And I said, what if they called you and asked for help?
And said they were in a gang situation that looked really dangerous.
I said, would you go help them?
And he said, well, sure I would.
I said, well, why? You could get hurt.
And he says, well, because they're my sons.
And I said, well, if you're going to be a teacher that matters at all, I said, those 75,000 gang members and everyone just like them, They're my sons too.
They're my brothers too. I said, what I believe about God, that's how it is.
And I said, so of course you don't choose something like that.
But if it comes up, you have to do what you have to do.
And you just have to love the kids.
To change schools around, you have to educate them.
You have to discipline them.
You have to protect them.
And you have to love them, just like if they were your own.
wow well i commend you on that i mean i was doing some research on this episode and i was sent these videos some of the most horrifically violent videos of kids beating each other up uh they're all dressed in black um i don't know if we have those videos but this might be a good time to Show what I'm talking about.
But essentially, I mean, it was such a degree of violence and then I'm reading some of these notes, reading about terroristic threats, reading about a social media page where kids that are beating each other up post videos.
And pretty much glorify, you know, the violence.
What is going on in these schools?
Like, why has it gotten to this point where the violence is so severe?
You have teachers being assaulted.
I've heard stories about teachers being raped.
I mean, it's just pretty extreme what's going on.
Well, the situation, it's simple, Vim.
It's not easy, but it's very simple.
And, you know, you hear people say, like, when a horrible crime's been committed, well, who in their right mind would do that?
Well, the answer is almost nobody, which is why about 90% of the crime was done by people either under the influence or people looking to get under the influence.
They were fiending for it.
And so the number one thing schools have to do, just in our recent research talking with our schools here in Washoe County, Close to half of all the students are using drugs all day, every day.
In the classes, in the bathrooms, at lunch.
What kind of drugs are we talking about?
Well, if nothing else...
A lot of them there because it's easiest in school, of course, just using the vapes and on marijuana.
But, you know, today's weed is not the weed of the 70s.
You can get pretty nuts, totally nuts on what's available in that.
And then, of course, you know, the other things are available.
I mean, meth is too readily available.
Fentanyl is a whole other story.
So they're using this.
And the schools, in my school in L.A., Every kid had an addiction.
And when you say kid, how old are we talking?
13 to 18.
Wow. And so when they do that, the first thing we had to do, of course, was get rid of that.
So we had, in a short time, we had the whole school 100% testing drug-free.
Now, it wasn't any involuntary force them to do this.
100% voluntary.
And for a decade...
And, of course, what stops then?
Well, 90% of what would be fights, arguments, violence, vandalism, etc.
And you do it quite simply.
You do it by giving the kids a reason not to.
They don't want to use, but if they don't have, if there's nothing riding on, they're stopping, peer pressure's going to win.
If you give them a school that loves them, is changing their life, somebody who really wants them to be good men and women, they step up.
That's what they want to be.
You know, it's, again, kind of another premise.
We don't believe God made any mistakes with anybody's life, and we don't believe anybody's life is irreparably broken.
If they were a mistake, then we're wasting our time, any of us in this nation, trying to change or fix or improve our kids or schools.
But if they're not broken, but merely lost and they need to be helped and supported firmly, not this wimpish, no accountability discipline that's ruining them.
But just simply a firm, fair sense of there's things you do and there's things you don't.
There's moral values that have held up mankind and you need to be part of that.
So when you do that, when you get them clean and sober, and then you're teaching them something where they're actually learning instead of so much of the, you know, the class being a mess and loud, everybody doing everything.
So they start learning, and like with our school.
So they're coming every day.
They're coming clean and sober.
The classroom, they're learning.
They go home feeling like they accomplished something.
They all had part-time jobs.
They all had savings accounts that we monitored to make sure they stayed there.
They all took concurrent college classes and their parents had to be there every month or we'd throw their kid out.
And I never had a parent miss a parent meeting for five years.
And so you do this.
Well, all of a sudden, the kids aren't broken.
They're great. And you bring them on and this happens.
But then I tell you what, it's like beating your head against the wall.
There's not a school district I've worked with that would buy into any one of those things that works.
Really? So they want to go for things like restorative justice as opposed to good old tried and true discipline?
Well, yeah. They start with not caring if almost half of them don't even show up on any given day.
Our school started at 8 o'clock.
If they got there at 8.01, I wouldn't let them in the door.
I'd say, get up earlier tomorrow morning.
Well... Kids typically run away from schools.
When they feel that the school loves them and cares and it's fun and they feel good about themselves, believe me, they weren't late more than once.
Wow. Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. I mean, is it because we just have terrible policies right now that the train has pretty much gone off the tracks in terms of public schooling?
It's all with leadership, and here's the problem.
So take our county, for example.
We've got a seven-member board, and since I've been here in Reno, we've gone through three superintendents.
And then with a big circle of other administrators, and then if we've got 100 schools, that'd be 100 principals.
Now in that 100 principals, circle of administrators, three superintendents, and seven board, How many of them do you think have ever personally taken a school themselves that was bad and turned it around?
How about none? Yeah.
Right. So, for example, if Southwest told me to come on down to the airport and fly a jet for them, well, I've never done it.
So we hire people that have never done what needs doing.
So that's where you need to start over.
And you need to... I mean, how did the common sense of it all go so wrong?
Well, we got too smart for ourselves.
You know, when they started laughing years ago about making gym teachers principals and stuff, like, ha-ha, what do they know?
Well, they typically knew how to take a class double the size of anybody else's and have everybody show up dressed...
Who remembers who they had for English or social studies back then?
You typically remember a gym teacher if you went to school a while back.
And just an example, nothing special about teaching PE, it's just that they were one of the last ones to fall and one of the ones to stand up and say, you're going to show up, you're going to be respectful, you're going to participate.
It's easy. I mean, it's simple.
It's very simple. Here's the thing.
I've offered our school district to help them set up a prototype of the school I just described.
People Magazine and CBS National News picked it as one of the top five stories of the year.
This is the school that you had set up in L.A. Yeah, right.
And you've written books about these topics, too.
So, I mean, there's probably nobody out there that has a level of experience that you do, or very few.
Very few, because my interest was not in seeing how fast I could get away from the classroom and children.
I was a principal about half my time, but as long as I was a principal, I always taught classes every week.
I mean, a non-teaching educator is like an oxymoron.
And so you've got people running our schools right now, making eight to ten times what a teacher makes.
And that person, those superintendents often haven't been in front of a class teaching children in 20 or 30 years.
And when they did, They were nothing, they weren't very good typically.
That's why they wanted to get out and get into administration as quick as they could.
I mean, it's just, the question is, how can everything that's wrong with it, there's so many more things that are wrong, can all those things be fixed and should we just work with these people to fix them?
Absolutely not.
And I'd tell any parent out there today, Start with California and Nevada, two places I know.
If you've got a child in public school in Nevada or California, either one right now, you do not care about what your child learns or their safety.
There's not a person in those schools that would step forward and guarantee that they're going to learn and, like I say, take a bullet for them if somebody came in.
So, are they going to be fixable?
No. It needs vouchers and you need to start over and let parents vote with their feet and get their kids the heck out of there.
Really? You don't think there's any redemption in these schools whatsoever?
No. When they're exposed, like right now, there's so many layers of corruption.
It's corruption and incompetence.
It's a race to see which is more.
But the corruption is some of the lawsuits that have come up in Washoe recently in our county and all over the place.
Some of them described by law enforcement officers as the worst things they'd ever seen in their careers, and the schools lied about them.
Wow. When you say lawsuits, can you get more specific?
Yeah, sure. Typically, it's situations where children have been abused, and in some cases, abused, underlined three times.
Nobody bothered. The principal wouldn't speak up about it because if he had to suspend anybody, his boss would get mad at him because he didn't want those.
They think if you suspend somebody, you're like being ineffective or racist or whatever they want to call it.
So the principal wouldn't do anything.
And then when the teacher would try to speak up, the principal would say, well, you need to deal with it because I'm not going to throw them out.
Are you talking about a specific instance or this is in general, this is the way?
Yeah, no, I know some hideous ones.
The most hideous one was, I was kind of part of it and not able, it was a settlement, unfortunately, out of court.
There was one that I heard about that, I guess there was a child being raped in the bus and there was a lawsuit, am I correct?
Well, what was published is that in Washoe County, the largest lawsuit they'd ever had paid out was a million and a half.
This one paid out four and a half million.
And, of course, the district, I think, would have paid 40 million, should have.
And they did mention that it involved abuse.
And part of the settlement was that Uh, that anybody connected with it was not able to talk about it, but it was, uh, they immediately started, I can tell you what the district immediately started doing was paying an inordinate amount of attention to what happens, uh, to their bus drivers and watching the buses closely and things like that.
And of course the district has had a number of, uh, abuse and negligence, et cetera, cases like this.
But, um, Yeah, yeah.
It was just as bad as it gets.
As bad as it gets.
And the worst part is that for the most part, the community will not know.
But that's why number one thing we're doing with our organization now, this Education Crusade, number one thing we're doing is exposing.
We don't want to sell anything behind closed doors.
Sorry, so that's what I was going to ask you about.
So Education Crusade, the purpose of it is for exposure?
It's three things.
To fix our schools, well, not fix them, to get to where people are going to demand vouchers for every parent, full amount, and then no interest in trying to fix the public schools.
If they don't fix themselves, nobody's going to go there and they'll collapse, and that's probably for the best.
To get to that point, the number one thing is exposing what's wrong.
So we started about three weeks ago.
We've had people from 11 schools come forward, elementary to high school, and testify to absolutely, like I say, the drugs, the abuse of teachers, the 80% of their classes being functionally illiterate.
You know, on and on.
So you expose this.
At the same time, anybody can say how bad it is.
So our second step is to provide solutions.
We've got them. And when we get enough exposure, the community is going to demand that they prove a solution.
That's where we're waiting to offer like a prototype school or whatever.
And then the third step, of course, is to demand competent leadership.
Of which they have a courageous, competent leadership, of which they have almost zero.
So in other words, what's going to be, and ultimately what's going to happen, Vim, is the lawsuit that should have been done forever, it's never been done in the country, and we're going to be bringing it forward.
And it has nothing to do with education because the courts won't support, well, let's fix the schools' lawsuits.
Mm-hmm. So this will have nothing to do with education.
You're hearing it first.
Nobody's heard this. The case we're going to file against the state of Nevada's public education system has nothing to do with education.
It has everything to do with criminal fraud.
For over a decade, they've advertised, promoted a product to sell to the public that they did not deliver.
They lied about it. We've been worst in the nation for over a decade.
So you're saying the product is education that they have not delivered on?
The product just happens to be education, right.
And for the viewer that doesn't know, I mean, I think we're in Nevada, we're 50th in education.
Worst in everything, right.
And the United States isn't that great, so worldwide, I mean, that's pretty much, I think, worst in the world would not be far-fetched.
We're worst in a nation that by itself is about 30th.
Wow. So what this will be, they've lied about the product.
They've sold it to the public and received billions of dollars a year.
They did not deliver what they promised.
They lied about it. The public's been severely damaged and the people who sold it to them have profited, which concisely fits the standards for approving fraud.
For felony fraud conviction, the State Department of Ed, a government agency, is not what they call, there is no privileged immunity in Nevada.
Government agencies can be sued.
So the provision for a fraud conviction is $15,000 fine per person who's collaborative with it, which is thousands of them.
One to 20 years in prison, and no limit on what the reparations would be to make them whole.
And what we'd be asking for is a minimum start with of 10 years of full voucher for every parent of every school-aged child in the state.
So that's the outcome you're hoping from the lawsuit?
That's what all this is about.
And if it's successful, it'll be a template for what almost every state in the union can do.
Wow. So you're simultaneously going to these schools, helping them fix them up, helping to teach teachers and children better ways.
At the same time, it seems like there's a dual-pronged attack, which is via lawsuits really turning the system upside down and starting these vouchers.
Well, no, I'm not going in the school.
They wouldn't let me in there if I paid them.
Oh, really? I'm a two-time teacher of the year.
I've written... Spoken nationally everywhere about this.
I tried to apply to be a $12 an hour substitute a few years ago in our schools, and they wouldn't touch me.
And there are about 100 teachers short on any given day, and to work for $12 an hour.
Wait, wait, so I'm trying to understand that.
So are they purposefully keeping you out of the system because you're too good or are they too incompetent to hire good people?
This is part of the fraud.
Our previous board president advertised on our website that they were continuing to give our 60,000 students, quote, a world-class education.
Now, this is with 60 to 96% of our kids functionally illiterate.
90% of the kids who graduate don't qualify for the most remedial college class.
And I told the board president, the only world-class education it could be is if it was the third world.
And so they say this.
And the parents...
Are working, are busy, a lot of them low income.
They can't come into school and see it.
If they want to come in, no such thing as an unannounced visit, Jim.
They won't let an elected official like a board member come in unannounced.
Can you imagine the county health agency giving several days advance notice to every restaurant they wanted to inspect?
We'd be dying of food poisoning if they did that.
But they don't. But the schools do.
And they make up a lot of excuses.
No. So no one gets in unannounced.
Almost no one, especially like me, gets in to see it.
Then they lie to the parents about how good it's going.
And so you can see there's no way to get there, to get to expose this, without the help of students and staff members and parents whose kids have experienced this.
So, that's what we're doing, exposing it from the outside, coming in.
I mean, the whole, like, you know, parents not being able to access, have access in terms of being able to drop into school and talk to somebody, I mean, when did that happen?
I guess, you know, growing up, it's like, you know, my parents could have dropped into school anytime and, you know, spoken to anybody they wanted to as long as they were available.
Oh, not only should they be able to drop in, it should be a requirement in any school district that a parent or guardian or family member, someone related to that child, has to do a day at school at least once a semester with their child if they're going to be there.
So they see exactly what's going on.
They can see how their child's behavior and learning matches up with everybody else's.
As this Far-left extremist philosophy started taking over the schools, going back almost to the early 70s.
The schools gradually had less and less to be proud of and more and more that needed to be hidden.
So right now in our county, and it's not unusual, the superintendents passed policies that can threaten a teacher's job if they talk to anybody about what goes on at school.
That limiting who can come in there.
Parents can come in that aren't supposed to tell anything that they see.
I mean, all these absolutely legally false policies that they still push through.
And by the way, there's a lot of similarities there between what's happening with, you know, the medical freedom in California, you know, basically being non-existent, where now there's laws in place where doctors can't have, you know, opinions divergent from what the mainstream pharma-derived opinion is.
And that seems like that's something that level of authoritarianism is invading the schools as well.
Well, how about when they wanted everybody...
We're trying to require everybody to get vaccinated.
Or you'd lose your job and you'd ask the question, well, I want to know what's in the vaccine.
Well, none of your business, but you've got to take it.
Whoever would approve that.
I mean, it's simultaneously, it seems like all the industries, the entire country is going in this direction.
I mean, going away from tradition into, I don't know, the abyss?
Oh, yeah. Well, they've just...
You can't teach what you don't know.
You can't lead what you don't know.
We're led by people who have...
And this is not...
This is hardly an argument for recruiting people for religion.
You've got people that the basic moral, spiritual, Judeo-Christian values that our country was built on, those aren't...
Those aren't in favor with a huge, overwhelming majority of people who either lead our schools or work in our schools or teach in our schools.
I mean, the infiltration of that sort of person, you know, there's obviously, you know, the Paul Whites of the world that are traditional educators that are using tried and tested formulas.
And then, you know, you have this kind of new thing going on.
When did that infiltration happen?
How did it happen? Where did this all go wrong?
Well, it's always, you know, they say, I'd say going back to the founding of our country, when, you know, they said that of all the colonists, about 25% were wanting to fight for their freedom, and the other 75% said, ah, maybe it'll get better if we just leave it alone and go away.
Nothing's changed. Why?
Well, you've heard this, I'll ask you.
If you said to, if I said to a teacher, you need to speak up, the teacher would say, I can't because, what would they say, Ben?
Because they're scared of losing their jobs.
Right. Well, I'd tell them I would have sympathy for you if I hadn't lost six.
So in my home here, I've got two stacks of paper, and they're both about the same size.
And one stack is all the very encouraging awards and honors I've received.
And the other stack, equally high, is all the contracts I've had non-renewed.
Now, in education, it's a real closed loop.
Typically, if that ever happens even once, you've got to pick a new career because you'll never get rehired.
Well, I believe in doing the right thing, and every job I got after being non-renewed was better than the previous one.
But I mean, that's six times I've been able to come home and say to my wife, well, good news and bad news, honey.
The good news is we're going to be able to spend a lot more time together.
The bad news is I lost my job.
Because you were too good, because it was politically motivated, because you're not going with it.
I had a kid who made five years of academic growth one time in one year on very objective tests.
And we were celebrating with him, a high school boy, in my class.
And I said, well, the question is, how did Uriel, his name, how did he do this?
I said, we know he did it.
It's provable. But I'd like to think that I'm just such a great, unique teacher that I just stuck a funnel in his ear and poured in learning.
I said, but I don't think that's it.
And one of the kids immediately said, you're right, Paul, you're not that good.
And I said, well, if that's not the case, what happened, then how do we explain it?
And one of the kids finally said, well, maybe he had it in him already.
And I said, well, what other explanation is there?
And you just kind of awaken them to that.
So what's it take to have schools like mine, to have other teachers by the millions doing everything I ever did times 10?
All it takes is for them to just say, You stand up and you tell the truth and it's not a matter of what's going to happen to you if you do.
That's the wrong question to ask.
But you see, you're not going to have that commitment.
You're going to have the point where you say, like I said, holding up the sign for the gang members of my phone number.
It's only if you really believe that That these are, every one of these people out there, you and your tech helpers there and everybody else, that they are, pardon me, your family, your sons, your daughters, your brothers and sisters.
But you're only gonna feel that if you yourself are embracing those Judeo-Christian values that founded this country.
And without that, your only question is gonna be, well, Yeah, like a friend of mine said to me one time, well, yeah, I got principles, but I mean, I wouldn't die for them or anything.
Well, I told him that by my definition, you have none.
And we need...
Because he wasn't willing to die for those principles.
Well, right, in other words, or you might say, wasn't willing to live for them.
And this is what it takes to...
If we're simply teaching kids to, oh, we teach them how to read.
So, oh, you can read a fifth grade level or an eighth grade level.
Well, instead of telling them you can learn to read, so you can go home and read to your little brother or sister or to your grandparent who can't see too well anymore.
Or we teach them, oh, yeah, you want to get these skills so you can make a lot of money.
Instead of saying you want to make a good living so you can really help a lot of other people.
The problem is the kids are not learning poorly, actually.
They're learning perfectly.
They're learning perfectly this amoral, self-centered, morally cowardice way that we're teaching them.
That's what's got to change.
So your approach is then to bring a lot of substance into these relationships and kind of approach it, when you're saying Judeo-Christian, I'm just seeing you approach it with like a sense of love towards these kids.
Sure it is. Sure it is.
Except that, like I say, so what do you do without those as your values, though?
What do you do when they seem so daggone unloving?
Like that girl that had me under her arm working on my face.
Pretty hard to remember that if I don't have a stronger principle.
I mean, what happened with that girl after that?
Were you able to get through to her?
We got along perfectly the rest of the year.
Really? Yeah.
And you saw change in her?
You saw improvement in her? Yeah, because I threw her out for a while, told her parents if anything came up again, I was going to get her arrested.
Not because I was mad at her, because I loved her enough to stop her from ruining herself.
And so, oh yeah, I'd say over the years, my wife and I probably, for shorter or longer periods of time, have probably taken in maybe four of the kids I taught who didn't have any kind of living situation.
Some for a couple years, some for a couple weeks.
And in every single case, the kids we took in were the ones who I had gotten to know by them being sent to my office and me throwing them out of school.
And we became actually friends, and these friendships lasted, still last, or in some cases lasted as long as they lived.
A lot of it's about earning their respect when you go in there.
Sure it is. And if you won't really, you get in there with the kids and you, again, when you start with them, you know, I always say, why do you have to go to school?
That's usually what I start with when I'm teaching.
Oh, why does the government want you to be, you have to go to school?
Well, we have to be smart.
I said, no, government could care less if you're smart or not.
I said, we know that as a country, if we don't have kids who have skills to live independently and the ability to take care of some of the ones, small number, but they're there, who have no way to take care of themselves and to voluntarily follow reasonable laws, we can't survive.
And I said, so life becomes then, school becomes a matter of, let's learn about all the situations that need help in our nation and in the world today.
And one of these is going to click with you and say, well, that looks like an interesting one to try to solve.
And I said, and that's what we're going to help you plug in and connect with a career that's going to be all about that.
But they're not taught that way, though.
They're not taught that way.
I want to be an athlete. I want to be a rapper.
And the teachers are not necessarily opening up their eyes, their imaginations.
I mean, it seems like they're pretty ineffective.
The ones who are, the ones who could be effective often say, you know, I didn't go to school to...
To have to wrestle a couple of kids to make my place, my room better.
Basically, just want to sit there and teach some.
Well, and of course, that has to do with what a pathetic job the schools are doing of teaching teachers at the college level.
And they have to teach them that it's a...
Well, okay, another question for you.
Of all the branches in the military, which one is considered the toughest one to make it in?
Marines? Without question.
Of all the branches in the military, which one...
So they're the hardest on you.
Of all the branches in the military, which one has the least problem meeting its recruiting numbers?
Army. Also the Marines.
Also the Marines, wow. People want to be in it because you want to be a part of a team...
Where you really work hard.
Athletics. A lot of times kids learn this lesson in athletics.
I want to push.
I want to do all I can.
And schools are just saying, now what we tell them is, I'll just show up.
You don't have to do any work at all.
Just sit there at your desk and sleep or eat or talk.
But if you're there every day, we'll pass you and give you a diploma.
Who on earth would be anything but frustrated and no respect at all for people that act that way?
Yeah, I want to quickly show a video just so the viewer gets an idea of what Paul is dealing with, what the challenges are, and how bad it's gotten out there.
So I don't know if we could cue that video real quick of the kids in school Oh Oh my god Oh Oh, shit!
Oh, my God!
Help! Help!
Help! Shit!
Shit!
Oh, shit!
You fucking mad, Parker?
Oh, shit!
You're playing with fire!
Alright, so...
Pretty horrible...
I mean, you have uneducated teachers, you have that going on, or undereducated teachers, you have that going on, you have parents that aren't available, and then you have somebody like a Paul White.
If I'm a teacher that is a teacher at that school where we saw some of those images, and I have a good, you know, let's say I want to do good, what do you tell me To do in terms of being a force for change in order to change that sort of thing that we're seeing.
Well, just back up just one quick second with the fight.
The most disturbing thing in that fight is not the girls punching each other, harsh as it was.
The laughing. The laughing.
The laughing. That tells you how sick a place is that they've let the kids get to where instead of them jumping in and breaking it up, And they joined.
And I'm noticing in the background that a couple of people that are just watching decide to start punching each other all of a sudden.
Like it was just spontaneous acts of violence.
Well then the person, the woman you saw, the adult in the orange trying to jump in there getting thrown around.
That was the principal.
There should have been a teacher at their every door in the hallway on a passage with that.
How on earth did that thing go on that long and there weren't an armload of teachers jumping in there?
Why was the door on the bathroom closed so that they didn't have somebody post somebody up on a bathroom?
And this wouldn't go on.
But in terms of what could people do to make a difference, speak up, insist on going to your child's school or grandchild's school.
And wait as long as it takes for them to clear it.
Tell them you want to do a full day.
Watch what happens.
Watch how few show up.
Watch how when the bells ring, it makes no difference.
The halls are full. Watch what goes on and is taught in the classes.
Speak up with a group just like ours.
Help us just get an unstoppable force to push for change here.
We'll turn right around and come to wherever you live.
County, city, state, and help you do the same thing.
And you've just got to, but you've got to, Elie Wiesel, the Nazi hunter, had a great quote.
He said, silence, you must speak up.
He says, silence favors the oppressed, never the oppressor.
Or favors the oppressor, never the oppressed.
And when we're silent, when this is going on, Then we deserve what we get.
And you know that great quote also from World War II by Pastor Martin Niemöller, the famous one where, you know, when the Nazis came for the Jews, I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant when they came.
And then he says, so he never spoke up.
He says, by the time they came for me, there was nobody left to speak up.
So what happens in our schools, it affects how we vote because it affects how we think.
It affects our economies.
It affects our safety.
It affects our health.
It is the key.
It is the thread that either holds everything together or if it's pulled out, makes everything collapse.
So please, and if they don't know how to get involved, call me.
24-7. I'll help.
Education Crusade.
Could you give us the URL, website, any information you have on how people might be able to contact you for help?
This particular incarnation is so new.
We're just putting the website together, but I'd encourage any of them to call at...
You can see we have a little...
We're setting up our little contribution thing.
But they can call me 24-7.
That's area code 775 if there's any way to post it.
775-685-8200.
775-685-8200.
I don't care where you live.
I'll help you if you call in.
I've worked with parents and kids all over the country.
Now, Paul, you're in your 70s now or 60s?
Yeah, I'm 70. And you're still doing this.
I mean, what gives you the energy every day?
You're one of the most passionate people I've met in regards to this topic.
Well, it'd be dishonest to attribute it to anything, the fact that God's blessed me, Ben.
And just like he's blessing all of us, these kids, the worst kids, to the richest, to the poorest, white, the black, whatever.
And it's simply... When we try to adhere to those moral spiritual values, it's amazing how well everything else works and how these other things seem to kind of fall away.
And, you know, there's a great line.
And again, you know, the Bible as literature is famous, is taught in any good school.
And, of course, one of the best lines, it says, if you want to, If you try to make yourself happy, you never will.
It says, but if you make your goal to try to help someone else, make them happy, you'll be successful.
But the side effect will be that's how you find your own joy, your own health, your own peace.
And so teaching this just over the years, yeah, the thousands of kids I've worked with, There's been many of them have better lives because of that.
Not one of them has had one bit of better life than it's given me by kind of just thinking about myself as little as possible.
Yeah, I mean, how much longer do you see yourself doing this?
Oh, go till I stop.
Go until I stop. I always tell the kids, I said, if I ever fall over on the floor and it looks like I'm gone in the classroom, I said, drag me downstairs, throw me in the dumpster, come back upstairs and keep the lesson going.
I said, I don't believe life.
I said, I believe life's eternal.
And I said, it might take us a while to see that or understand it.
But I said, the best way to be happy and have a great life is forget about yourself.
See what you can do for somebody else.
Is there anything about Education Crusade that we didn't touch upon that you'd like to talk about?
No, it only came about, really.
I'd been wanting to do something similar again for a while and had gotten into some other activities.
And we'll give a shout-out to Andrea here, who kind of said, well, here, we need this.
Let's do it now.
And it came together in about 24 hours.
Off we're going. And Travis also.
What's next for you guys?
Keep doing more exposing until there's just a critical mass reached where the community says, we're not going to tolerate it anymore.
And along the way, as we come upon any cases that are just like the one you mentioned, that horrible...
A special ed case that was sued as long as we come up on any of those.
Sue the daylights out of them.
But nothing's going to change if you settled 1,000 out-of-court settlements.
We have...
You have to go the full distance, you're saying.
You can't settle it.
We have almost 500,000 kids, students just in Nevada.
So if we got 1,000 out-of-court settlements...
That wouldn't change the system.
The district would just keep paying it off with our tax money and just bottle up tighter and less transparent.
So you need to do those lawsuits sometimes.
But the biggest thing it needs is just to show people to say, this is wrong.
It's just like in East Berlin, they had had enough.
And one night, years later, they just come pouring out of their houses.
Walking toward the wall, right past the soldiers with the rifles who didn't want to shoot them and joined them, surged across into West Germany.
That was the end of the Berlin Wall.
Not a shot fired.
One of the least reported miracles of modern history, really.
Yeah, yeah. Wow.
Well, Paul, this has been...
Sorry? That's what will happen with schools.
And we stay in it until it does.
Yeah, it's got to change.
I mean, it's absolute insanity what's happening.
I mean, this could be a lost generation that we're looking at in front of us because of all these follies.
Yeah, we can't let it happen.
Yeah. Is there anything else that you'd like to mention, Paul?
Just like I express my gratitude to you for your interest in this, for putting your own show together, for doing this.
And without opportunities like this, I'd be kind of sitting here at my desk talking to myself.
Yeah, likewise. Gratitude to you, too.
I mean, it's amazing what you're doing, and it's amazing that you're still doing this.
I mean, most people are retired at this age, and your passion for fixing these wrongs speaks volumes.
So thank you for doing what you're doing.
Well, I mean, if it's between doing this and putting on the white shoes and white belt and hitting the early bird special at the cafeteria, I don't think it's a good decision, right?
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Paul.
We'd love to follow up on, especially these lawsuits sound really fascinating.
We'd love to hear more about, especially that main lawsuit you're talking about.
That sounds like it can make quite an impact.
It's never been done. This has never been done.
Yeah. That's sometimes the territory we have to go through to fix some of these critical issues with our world right now, with our country right now.
Well, and also, just last thing I would encourage, please, anyone in any school district in Nevada, especially Clark County or Washoe, but anywhere, if you know something that's not right, By all means, call us 24-7.
It's completely confidential.
You see the number rolling on the screen there.
Speaking up does make a difference, and it will be confidential, and we'll stick with you until the last dog dies.
Amazing, Paul. Amazing.
I wanted to, you know, thank you, Paul.
I wanted to also give a special thanks to Andrea for helping us put this together and Travis for helping us produce this episode.
Also a special shout out to Studio 17.
Thank you very much for joining us on Blood Money.
Join us on our next episode and be sure to go to americahappens.com and drop us your email address so we send out our newsletter whenever we have new episodes of our shows.
Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Vim.
Thank you. Have a wonderful night.
The new group of concerned community members gathered outside of the middle school to express their grievances.
Koloit News Now's Crystal Garcia was there and has the details.
I'm with Education Crusade or a new group.
We've just had enough. Paul White, local resident, created a group referred to as the Education Crusade, made up of concerned community members who say enough is enough.
Goals of Education Crusade would be Expose the situation.
Community has to know how bad it is.
White, backed by local attorney Joey Gilbert, says the school district has been downplaying numerous cases of drug use and violence happening inside Washoe County schools and across Nevada, with the incident on December 15th at Dilworth being the latest.
I went to all 17 counties.
This is not in one county.
It's in all the counties. The problems are the same across the board.
We have to remove this restorative justice.
This restorative discipline must go away.
During Tuesday morning's gathering outside Dilworth, Crusaders said that Bill AB 168 Passed in 2019 makes it harder to discipline kids.
It's not just bringing legal action.
It's getting on the legislature and letting them know that these policies have become a disaster.
They might have been well-intentioned, but the repercussions from them are disastrous and they need to be changed.
The group alleges the district is continually covering up incidents that are compromising the safety of teachers and students and want action to be taken.
If you're a teacher, if you're a parent, if you're a student in this school system and you've been harmed physically, psychologically, mentally, sexually, you need to reach out to my office.
I think it's going to take more than just the school district keeping themselves cloistered.
It's going to take all of us as a community to work on these problems in our schools.
It's not just a school district problem.
It's a community problem.
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