“Is anyone buying this?”

“Logistics” was a popular word among area school officials over the last few days.  Confronted with the benign (yet somehow controversial) opportunity to have a sitting United States President deliver a message that stressed hard work and personal responsibility directly to the nation’s schoolchildren, many school districts opted to punt.   Rather than take a stance one way or another, they took cover and cited “logistics.”  For example, the Bentonville, Arkansas  School District released the following statement:

“The decision to provide the recorded message and make it available on the website is being made for a number of reasons:
logistics – perhaps as many as 3,000 students will be eating lunch at that time; two schools are not in session on September 8^th; most students and teachers have already planned for instruction on that day; and several of our schools are not equipped with appropriate technology to show the speech in the right setting..”

Sounds plausible, until one considers that it’s simply illogical to insist that every student must be deprived of an experience simply because the experience can’t be shared by all.

In a similar move, after informing parents that the speech would not be a part of their students’  school day, the Fayetteville, Arkansas school district released a statement on Friday, saying that:

“The decision to provide the recorded message and make it available on the website is for logistics and convenience purposes.  Many students will be at lunch, P.E., music, engaged in pre-planned instruction, labs or other activities during the original broadcast.”

Alan Wilbourn, responding to questions over Friday’s announcement stuck to the talking-points, echoing that “In the elementary school, it’s primarily logistics.”  To be fair, Wilbourn later insisted that the district’s intent was not to prohibit student viewing, but that there would be no coordinated effort.

Of course we all know that logistics wasn’t the real issue.  Faced with tough choices,  most school officials would rather avoid controversy all together than to take a stand that is sure to please some and infuriate others.  In Fayetteville, with a ginormous millage election now less than a week away, avoiding controversy was especially important.

That strategy seems to have backfired.  As it turns out,  plenty of people in Fayetteville didn’t buy the “logistics” argument.  After what the Northwest Arkansas Times referred to as “a flurry of criticism by e-mail, telephone, and the Internet,” Superintendent Vicki Thomas held a Labor Day press conference to clarify completely revise the district’s plan.  Under the new plan, viewing of the speech was being “strongly encouraged” with the hope that  every student be given the opportunity unless parents requested that their children be kept from participating.

To their credit, district leaders responded to the public pressure quickly and reports  estimate that nearly 90% of the district’s children saw the speech.  And, in the end, they chose the best path.  They let parents decide what was best for their own children.  At the press conference, however, Thomas was asked the inevitable question that was on everyone’s mind: Will this controversy affect the millage vote?

It’s probably safe to say that those who had planned on voting in favor of the millage were many of the same people that were offended by the district’s poor handling of the Obama speech controversy.   While voters may cut the district some slack for eventually getting it right, the entire fiasco was a public relations nightmare.  At the very least, school officials came across on the various news reports looking a lot less like concerned members of the community and a lot more like, well,  politicians.  And, let’s face it, people have a hard time trusting politicians.  As we  have all recently learned, even benign messages  like “stay in school”— when uttered by a politician—can spark controversy.  If support for the millage vote next Tuesday comes up short, some of the loss may be attributable to the hit the district took in terms of credibility over the last few days.

In the end, Obama’s speech wasn’t controversial at all, and reasonable people appreciated the message he gave to students.  Maybe everyone should lighten up when it comes to Presidents spending some time with America’s children.

Thanks to the Fayetteville Flyer for the excellent video.