Missoula School Watchdog was going through some newspapers the other day. Msw noticed an article that was missed when reading the daily newspaper at an earlier date.
The newspaper highlighted in this blog post is the April 4th, 2019 edition of the Missoulian, Missoula's daily newspaper.
On the editorial page is a guest column by a 14 year old. This 14 year old is a student at the private International Baccalaureate Spanish immersion school, Missoula International School and is in 8th grade. (See the sister blog of msw www.prescottschoolmissoula.blogspot.com for the corruption by Missoula County Public Schools in regard to the lease of the public school Prescott School to the private school Missoula International School)
The student, Camille Sherill, wrote a guest column as noted above titled "Help dogs with unfair reps".
The title is actually misleading in msw's view. The wording "unfair reps" does not really address the jist of the column. What the column is highlighting is pit bulls. There is no pit bull words in the title. This is really the newspapers doing, not the writers, however, msw thought that it is worth noting, because as mentioned above, the article escaped notice for many days.
Due to time constraints, msw at this time, cannot go into as much depth as wished. To make a long story short, the guest column by the student reveals a huge lack of information about the threat of pit bulls in our society. The student mentioned the city of Bozeman as it relates to pit bulls and does not even mention that fairly recently a woman was killed by a pit bull in Bozeman! How can one doing a guest column not mention this huge story?
Additionally, the MIS IB student did not look into pit bull information sites on the web such as www.dogsbite.org and it's FB page. Almost everyday or it seems like at least once a week or so msw gets a FB post about someone getting killed and/or maimed by a pit bull(s).
She, the writer, also most likely did not read the book by J. Thomas Beasley titled, "Misunderstood Nanny Dogs?" The book explains the history of pit bulls and how dangerous they are and gives so many statistics that after one reads the book one cannot reach any other conclusion that pit bulls are really not for use as an everyday pet.
The fact that this student's teachers and the school, Missoula International School, accepted this work without proper study and research speaks to the legitimacy of the private school. Would a parent really want their child not to be challenged in a very important community project paper? Would a school really want this reputation, that of not expecting it's students to back up their writing assignments?
Missoula School Watchdog is a pit bull attack survivor, and ironically this attack took place just blocks from Prescott School, the school which MIS is leasing. msw has always considered that if a child that attended MIS or any child in the neighborhood for that matter had been attacked rather than this adult the outcome could have been a death or even more tragic.
Does someone from MIS need to be attacked by a pit bull for the dangerousness of pit bulls to sink in to students at MIS or indeed for others? I only wish it does not.
