District 200 made cowardly choice

Dear District 200 Board,

My daughter, Emma, is in first grade at Longfellow. I have, up until now, had nothing but praise for District 200 and, in particular, for Longfellow School.

However, I am keenly disappointed at the decision to not show the President's address to the students this coming Tuesday.

You have many excuses, lunch time, the extreme length of the talk (20 minutes!), the ruin that would befall the school technology, and best of all, the implication that, because you had not had time to review it, some sort of inappropriate content would be inadvertently delivered to our children.

The last is the most offensive.

All of the others would be reasonable objections if you made a commitment to show this address to each class either in real-time or at an appropriate time later Tuesday or early on Wednesday. But, you do not do that.

You indicate that you will review the message to decide if it is "appropriate". If you so deem, you will then make it available to teachers to decide if they want to show it.

You treat it as though you expect this vile creature who we elected President to spew some sort of explicit sexual or violent content, and then, you place the responsibility directly on the shoulders of the teachers who must now face down a manufactured controversy.

Of course, you quietly ignore the offer from the White House to get a copy on Monday for your review. Now, I am not going to tell my daughter that her school thinks she needs to be protected from Mr. Obama, a man who, though really only a person on television, she likes.

I will take advantage of the copies that you will be providing and I will encourage my daughter's teacher to show the speech in her class. And someday, I hope, she will grow up to be a responsible adult who will not countenance the likes of this cowardly school board.

Dave Basener

Wheaton