Would someone please explain to me why my daughter (a fourth-grade student at St. Margaret’s School in Bel Air) is watching a speech, during her school day, delivered by a pro-choice president who nominated a radical abortion-rights advocate (Kathleen Sibelius, who has effectively been excommunicated from the church itself) to his cabinet?
If the president is genuinely concerned with educational performance, wasting 15 minutes of my daughter’s instructional time is, at the very least, an odd way to show it. And allowing students with a note from their parents to be dismissed from the classroom during the broadcast is a cop out, a de facto punishment, and a kind of political branding which has no place in an elementary school classroom.
During this highly polarized and hyper-political age, Catholic schools, now more than ever, should err on the side of caution and reject any form (or appearance) of political indoctrination, either from the left or the right. This speech should never have been aired in a Catholic school in the first place.