School administration says Obama speech not censored

Spotty airing blamed on technological deficiencies

The Gunnison RE1J school district didn’t set out to stop students from listening to President Obama’s September 8 back-to-school speech, but due to perceived technological constraints, that’s ultimately what happened.

Superintendent Jon Nelson says that in the days leading up to the broadcast—in which the President told students to work hard, take responsibility for their actions and to not let failures define them—many parents called to say they didn’t want their children to see the speech. Others called to say they did want their children to watch it.
But the input didn’t have anything to do with none of the school sites showing the speech in an assembly setting and only a few showing the speech in classrooms. The district left the choice of presenting the televised speech to students up to each teacher.
“If everybody is online and trying to watch a streaming video, the system will crash,” Nelson says, explaining that the renovations that are under way around the district will remedy the problem.
“We do not have cable into our gymnasiums or auditoriums where we could take students who are interested in seeing the speech,” Nelson adds. “It was all up to teachers in their classrooms.”
Some teachers with civics and government classes did show the speech in real time and others decided to incorporate it into their classes’ curriculum at a later date.
“We do have the ability to make the decision of whether or not to show the speech. We just did not have the technology to deliver it,” Nelson says. “It was pretty much left up to each site.”
Crested Butte Community School principal Stephanie Niemi says she left the decision to show the speech up to the school’s teachers. While she didn’t get any requests from parents that children not see the speech, she did get a “nasty” and uninformed email from a parent accusing the school of racism and censorship.
Niemi says there was never an effort to suppress the speech, only a scheduling conflict that had classes in session in the multi-purpose room where an assembly presentation of the speech might have been held. She also cited the technology issues.
The district’s school board policy does deal with controversial issues and would allow students to excuse themselves from presentations of certain subject matter.
Gunnison Elementary School principal Marta Smith made that decision for students, opting out of trying to stream the video of the speech for the ubiquitous technology concerns.
Nelson said part of the concern at the elementary school was that the content of the speech would be focused at an older group of students. “Are kids going to be able to understand it or will they sit there and say big deal at the expense of instructional time?” he asked.
But the technological hurdles the district faced in showing the speech weren’t insurmountable, according to the district’s system’s manager Canon Leatherwood. He felt that the decision not to show the speech to students en masse was more administrative than technological.
“I wasn’t told about it if there was a problem [with the technology],” Leatherwood says. “The capacity to stream the video would have been available if I had been told in advance. If they needed access to the bandwidth, I could have made that space available.”
The district should not have any reason not to show presidential speeches in the future, with new infrastructure being installed throughout the valley that will increase the amount of bandwidth available by several orders of magnitude. However, the additional capacity will not be realized until later in the school year.