as an assault on students’ rights, saying: “If we were to exclude students from realistic fiction including controversial topics without happy endings, it would hardly address student concerns, curiosities or prepare them for real life.”A school board member, the Rev. Dennis Ritter, who is endorsed by Democrats and Republicans, told me Saturday in a phone interview that he readand thinks it offers a “positive message” despite the dark subject of climate disasters.
“I’m flabbergasted,” Robyn Underwood, one of the Kutztown parents critical of the decision to kill the program, told me this weekend. Underwood said she’s part of a parent group that just readand “I see nothing in there that’s political at all.” She added: “I believe that climate change is real — the things that are happening in this book are happening in real life.
But while the clampdown on this one book is disturbing, the most troubling aspect of what just happened in Kutztown is the reason Temchatin, the superintendent, gave parents for pulling the plug on— that the middle school teachers were feeling uncomfortable and concerned that politics would become a distraction.over the classroom that terrifies teachers from discussing any subject that might be controversial.