President Barack Obama’s speech went off without a hitch Tuesday, as he addressed millions of students across the country. The Daily Iberian chose two schools with students of differing ages to report on the president’s speech so that we could gauge local reaction.

A few statistics about how many students watched reveal a couple of things. No matter who’s president, older students are more concerned with hanging out with friends and younger students who got extra playtime are probably rubbing it in today.

With all the hullabaloo Friday about the president speaking to students nationwide, Iberia Parish school officials thought it prudent to allow parents to decide whether it was all right to listen to a speech by the leader of the free world. So, they sent the students home Friday with permission slips. If a student did not have a slip signed by a parent or guardian saying it was OK to listen to the president’s speech, that student had to find something else to do.

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Of the 1,500 NISH students who left school with permission slips Friday, only 500 returned them allowing the students to watch the president’s speech. At Dodson about 40 percent of the almost 400 students came back with permission slips allowing them to watch the president.

The Dodson students who did not watch were sent to the playground for an extra half-hour of outside time. Ask most elementary school-aged students which they would prefer, listening to a grown-up talk or playing outside and what choice do you think they would make?

And of the remaining 60 percent of the students, how many of them do you think actually took the permission slip to their parents?

At NISH, I would suspect that out of the two-thirds of the student body that did not return permission slips to school most of them probably never took the slips out of their school bags or cars. The speech probably was not important to them, regardless of who was in the White House. Of the third who took signed permission slips to school, several were observed as chatting with friends rather than paying attention to the speech. Again, a grown-up is telling them to stick it out, apply themselves and finish school, yada, yada, yada. It’s like Charlie Brown’s teacher ... “Wah wah, wah-waaahh.”

Parents need not worry about the president indoctrinating the country’s youth to believe as he believes, at least not from one presidential speech that took instructional time away from millions of students.

If the government really wanted to brainwash America’s youth, it would start with television and include little messages in movies. They could make raps about health care reform, like “Yo, student, what ya need is bein’ sent; gonna get all you can from the government,” only something actually creative. And maybe Vice President Joe Biden could perform it.

Whenever the State of the Union Address comes on television or if there is a presidential speech that airs and I want to watch it, my children are nowhere around.

“Daddy, you really like to watch them talk?” they usually say. Then they scatter. They want to do something fun like skateboarding, reading, drawing or painting.

The messages that students should stick to their studies, not drop out of school and never give up are constantly broadcast to students from the school system. Teachers, coaches and administrators probably tell some students daily that they can do it if they only apply themselves. If students who need to hear that message are not listening to people who are involved in their lives and actually showing them daily they care about their well-being, it is unlikely that anyone whom they have never met could influence them, even a charismatic president.

JEFF ZERINGUE is managing editor of The Daily Iberian. He can be reached at iberianedit@bellsouth.net.