Every year the theatre department of the university puts on a children’s play to which elementary schools in the region bring their students. Our elementary school has attended for more than twenty years. A week or so before our son was due to go on this school trip I heard through the local grapevine that the trip had been cancelled.
Rumours raged, gossip was passed on as fact and no one was prepared to say in public what the problem was. I was pissed the trip was cancelled without any public consultation. Consequently, I wrote the following to the local newspaper.
Because of the lobbying efforts of a group of people, the annual field trip to see the children’s play at the University of Minnesota, Morris has been cancelled.
All Morris Area Elementary School parents have the right to decide for themselves which activities their children participate in. In this case, though, parents have been denied that right and not even been invited to participate in the conversation.
If you think you should have been allowed to make the choice, regardless of what that choice would have been, please contact the elementary school principal.
It is important that the school hear from parents who believe they should have made the choice and not had it made for them.
A group of fifth grade parents will be taking their children to see the play on Thursday, 21st April, at 1 p.m. Please consider joining us. Today it’s the children’s play, tomorrow what else will be lost without public discussion?
While I was fuming at home and to fellow parents about the stupidity of all this, others in our community were equallly unhappy. The director of the play shared information in the local press about the play’s actual content and the process that he went through in creating a production suitable for the local community. (The sets were stunning, the acting troupe marvellous and the play had important things to say about bullying and tolerance that are very pertinent for the students in our school district.) The Chancellor of the university funded a ‘parent’s preview’ of the production. Of course few parents came as we don’t actually want to make a decision based on the facts. Rumour and gossip are oh so much more accurate.
You’ll be pleased to hear several schools ignored the gossip and brought their children to see a wonderful (and entirely appropriate) production. In fact one of these school’s superintendents decided to bring their school after attending the parent’s preview. Many parents joined the group of fifth grade parents I mentioned in my letter and pulled their children from school for the afternoon so that they could attend the play. There have been a flurry of letters to the editor (see below) criticising the behaviour of those who had acted to cancel the school trip and praising the production.
So far no one has publicly declared themselves one of this instigators of this episode. Clearly when rumour, gossip and threats are your weapons you need to act in secret and scuttle about in the dark.
When will Hell freeze over? Current temperature 30F/-1C (windchill 16F/-9C)
The following links point to Letters to the Editor that others have written in response to this controversy. I agree with all of them except where noted.
