President Obama gave a publicly broadcasted speech today to students regarding the importance of their future education. While this raised little concern among parents across the nation, the same could not be said of Obama’s speech last year. According to Spectra teacher Jon Travis, the main cause of the hype over 2009’s Back to School speech was Obama’s situation at the time. People were afraid that Obama would use his popularity to sway children into becoming pro-Democratic early on.

“Parents were upset because they didn’t know what he would be discussing,” Travis said. “They thought that [the speech] would be entirely Democratic indoctrination”.

The speech was anything but pro-Democratic propaganda. Obama simply discussed the importance of staying in school and personal responsibility in regards to academic achievement. Since this year’s speech is following the same basic format as last year’s, people have considerably less to worry about.

Nick Ponche