Sarasota school chief: Letter writer was wrong

Posted by Mark Chapman on March 4th, 2010 at 2:30 pm

The recent let­ter to the edi­tor caused me some con­cern, so I attempted to see if there was any val­i­da­tion for it. I wound up con­tact­ing Lori White, who was quoted in the let­ter and received the attached from her. She OK’d my send­ing it on to the Edge.

- Jean Airey

Dear Ms. Airey,

Thank you very much for your March 2 inquiry regard­ing the let­ter you saw in the Engle­wood Edge online newslet­ter. I truly appre­ci­ate your tak­ing the time to find out whether the con­tent of the let­ter has any basis in fact rather than sim­ply accept­ing what it said at face value.

The let­ter appar­ently is a com­bi­na­tion of bits of mis­in­for­ma­tion regard­ing two dif­fer­ent events that took place last Sep­tem­ber. Nei­ther occurred as described in the letter.

The first event hap­pened in Burling­ton, New Jer­sey, not in Sara­sota County. A class of stu­dents there sang a song on You-Tube that praised Pres­i­dent Obama for call­ing on the coun­try to advance com­mu­nity ser­vice, equal pay for equal work and equal rights for peo­ple of all races. A num­ber of on-line writ­ers pre­sented and com­mented on the video as if it was a reflec­tion of wide­spread activ­ity in pub­lic schools. No such song ever was sung in Engle­wood or any­where in Sara­sota County Schools.

The ref­er­ence to two teach­ers being dis­ci­plined may have been related to an event that did occur in the Sara­sota schools. In Sep­tem­ber, it was brought to my atten­tion that a video called The Story of Stuff had been shown in some Sara­sota Mid­dle School classes.

The video made the case that the min­ing, man­u­fac­tur­ing and other indus­trial activ­ity required to pro­vide con­sumer goods to Amer­i­cans has a very detri­men­tal effect on the envi­ron­ment. Upon view­ing the video, the prin­ci­pal deter­mined that it did not prop­erly rep­re­sent all points of view on the sub­ject and pre­sented some ques­tion­able infor­ma­tion as facts.

The prin­ci­pal sus­pended any fur­ther pre­sen­ta­tion of the video and wrote let­ters of instruc­tion to the teach­ers involved. The let­ters stated that the teach­ers had vio­lated a dis­trict pol­icy requir­ing teach­ers to sub­mit any videos that are not part of the dis­trict video col­lec­tion to be approved by the prin­ci­pal before being shown to classes.

The Sara­sota County School Dis­trict has a very clear set of stan­dards and expec­ta­tions for the infor­ma­tion pre­sented to stu­dents. Although I cer­tainly encour­age teach­ers to be cre­ative, I have never said and would never say, “Teach­ers may teach as they wish.”

Again I thank you for check­ing the accu­racy of what you read online. I appre­ci­ate the oppor­tu­nity to explain that in this case, the facts have been con­fused to the point of being nearly unrec­og­niz­able and that the quote attrib­uted to me was entirely fabricated.

Sin­cerely,

Lori White, Superintendent

Sara­sota County Schools

(Jean Airey is a con­trib­u­tor to Engle­wood Edge, but is not an employee. She was act­ing on her own in con­tact­ing Ms. White. Engle­wood Edge, like print news­pa­pers, does not vet Let­ters to the Edi­tor for fac­tual accu­racy. Read­ers, how­ever, are encour­aged to respond.)

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