Shame on the hysterical parents who called the school district offices demanding that President Obama’s address to schoolchildren be banned from school view. And shame on the Bellevue School District for caving in to that hysteria.

The decision should have been left up the teachers. If we trust our teachers in the first place – which presumably we do since we pay them and send them our children day after day – we should trust them to present the president’s address in an intelligent, balanced, critical manner that would render its content irrelevant. So what if the speech had turned out to be propaganda? Teachers would have helped the students to spot that. That’s what the teachers do.

If you can’t trust your teachers, take your kids out of the Bellevue schools.

I saw something in the way of an apology from the district on its website, for its hasty decision to ban the speech. Now I am waiting to hear from those parents who put the district in its predicament: you ought to apologize to your neighbors and repent of your knee-jerk mental responses. ‘Fess up – you made a mistake.

Colin May, Bellevue