PA school districts pull plug on Obama speech

The Boyertown Area School District, which covers rural communities in Berks and Montgomery counties, and the Daniel Boone School District in southern Berks County, will not allow students to watch a controversial speech by President Obama scheduled to be broadcast to schools across the country on Sept. 8.

From a story in The Pottstown Mercury by reporter Evan Brandt:

When President Obama speaks to the nation's school children Tuesday, it's unlikely if many local school students will see or hear the speech live.

An informal survey of area school districts reveals a variety of responses to the upcoming speech with two commonalities — no district has plans to show the speech live to the entire school, and every district has given parents the opportunity to have their children "opt out" of seeing the speech if it is to be shown in the classroom

Some districts, like Pottstown and Perkiomen Valley, have decided to leave use of the speech in the classroom up to the discretion of individual teachers, while others have taken a position that its content must be reviewed to determine if it fits in with the district curriculum, including Boyertown and Daniel Boone.

The speech has generated some controversy in what The New York Times called in a Friday article "a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse their children from listening."

Read the full story at the newspaper's Web site.

Boyertown's announcement on the speech:

http://www.boyertownasd.org/

Daniel Boone's announcement on the speech:

http://www.dboone.k12.pa.us/Lists/Announcements/Attachments/34/President%20Speech%20Plan.pdf