School Districts Varied On Decision About Speech

Edgewood ISD Superintendent Jack Shellnutt said he knew he had a difficult decision to make regarding whether to show the live video feed of President Barack Obama’s address to students on Tuesday.

Shellnutt also said he wonders what all the fuss was about.

"It went all right as far as I know. Some people didn’t want their children to hear it and they were given that choice. But it (the speech) was nothing more than what was in the outline…exactly what I thought it would be about," Shellnutt said.

President Obama, speaking from Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., gave a speech directed at the nation’s elementary and secondary school students urging them to stay in school, pay attention to their teachers, listen to parents, grandparents and other adults, and work hard in their classes.

However, the special address drew a lot of criticism from some who feared Obama wanted to use the occasion to inject partisan ideas into young minds. Shellnutt said he found nothing of that sort in the speech outline made available before Tuesday, but sent home "opt-out" letters to parents in the district who did not want their child viewing the event.

"There were a few parents that did (complain)," he said of the decision. "Nowadays, it seems people get all stirred up over nothing. Ten years ago, nobody would have thought about it, but the way media and technology are now, there seems to be so much mistrust.

"I’m not saying they (some parents) didn’t have legitimate concerns," Shellnut added, "but the concerns people expressed turned out not to be the case."

Other districts took a different approach. Canton ISD Superintendent Dr. Jerome Stewart said he made the decision not to air the live speech after determining it did not apply to the district’s curriculum standard, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).

However, Stewart added that teachers were given a petitioning process if they wished to show the live speech, with an "opt-out" provided to parents of students in the respective classroom. He said no teachers in the district responded to the offer.

"Most people we received calls from approved of the decision to not show it," Stewart said. "Only two callers expressed disappointment that it wasn’t shown."

He added that the speech was made available in various formats after it was originally broadcast.

"It wasn’t as though students could have never accessed it otherwise," he said.

Stewart said he also read the pre-speech outline and "did find some things that might have lent themselves to being partisan."

He added, "However, to the credit of the White House, those parts were changed."

At Fruitvale ISD, Superintendent Bill Boyd said issues of insufficient Internet bandwidth and the time of the live speech led to a decision not to show it Tuesday.

"We are going to download the speech, though, and make it available to teachers to show," Boyd said, adding that the matter was being handled at the campus level by the respective principals. He said it would not be mandatory viewing for students.

In January, the district provided a live Internet-based broadcast of President Obama’s Inauguration Ceremony.

"We showed the Inauguration Ceremony in the cafeteria for our elementary students and in the gym for our secondary kids…We found we could get about two-thirds of the audio and two-thirds of the video and they never synchronized," Boyd said.

"I can’t picture watching a lesson or speech with the same technical problems, and with the timing of the speech around lunch for some of our students, we simply decided it would be better to put it on the Internet (the archived video file) for our teacher to use and we are also making it available by burning it onto a disc," he explained.

Shellnutt also said the time of the speech broadcast conflicted with lunch periods for some intermediate school and high school students, but was made available to any of those students who wanted to see it.

The Edgewood ISD administrator said he has no regrets about the decision to show the broadcast.

"I’m sure it irritated some and I’m sure it made some happy. It would have been the same if we had decided not to show it. All you can do in a situation like that is try to do what you think is best for the kids, and I thought the President’s message was a message they needed to hear."

Other districts who chose not to air the speech were Martins Mill, Grand Saline, Wills Point and Van.