Dear Editor,First, I’d like to say thank you for publishing a great newspaper for our community. I am always informed and enlightened by your paper and appreciate the way you keep us in touch with the local community. My favorite writer is Kathy Hare, who always has something important and thoughtful to say.Next, I want to express my extreme dismay about the complaints aired by our community to the school district with respect to the broadcast of the President’s speech to our nation’s schoolchildren about staying in school and working hard that was broadcast Sept. 8. My own daughter’s principal in D 49 was compelled to treat the President’s speech just like any other possibly “controversial” subject and planned only to show it in a way that would allow the complaining parents to opt out of it. Apparently, the district received complaints that parents would pull their kids from school if the kids were allowed to watch the President’s speech.Here we have a President who can speak eloquently and maybe even inspire a few kids to work hard in school and graduate from high school. He wants to start a dialog among them about what it means to set goals, work hard and stay in school. That is a dialog that can be had only among the students themselves, not watching it later at home as some parents have suggested.What are these hate-mongering right-wing Republicans afraid of? That their kids might actually think for themselves? That they might actually see a black man looking presidential and inspiring kids? When George H.W. Bush made a similar speech when he was President, and again when George W. Bush spoke at a school to promote the No Child Left Behind Act, did the “left wing liberals” start a boycott? No, because we aren’t afraid of a dialog. That is what makes a democracy and what makes America great.Kelly Jo Salling-DaviesPeyton
