President Barack Obama had a clear message to students Tuesday in his nationally televised back-to-school pep talk.
President Barack Obama had a clear message to students Tuesday in his nationally televised back-to-school pep talk.
From a podium set up for him at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., Obama talked to the nation’s school children–from kindergarten through high school–telling them they had a stake and responsibility in their own education.
Nationwide, it is the start of the new school year. Some kids have been in school for only a few weeks, others, like Chicago Public Schools students, started school Tuesday.
In the days before Tuesday’s address partisan lawmakers and other pundits criticized Obama for planning to make the speech, though presidents before him had made similar appeals to students.
And White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was frank about criticism leveled against Obama’s plans to talk to students.
“I think we’ve reached a little bit of the silly season when the president of the United States can’t tell kids in school to study hard and stay in school,” Gibbs said last week.
Former Republican First Lady Laura Bush was vocal about her support for Obama to speak to the nation’s children.
Bush, during news interview by CNN in Paris, said, “it’s also really important for everyone to respect the president of the United States.”
“There’s a place for the president of the United States to talk to school children and encourage school children” to stay in school. And she said parents and others also need to send that message.
Either way, Obama was down to serious non-partisan business Tuesday as he told students, “Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you because here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”
Obama, the nation’s first Black elected president, who recalled in the books he penned and retold again Tuesday about the many gaffes he made growing up and through college, injected his own experiences in his speech and told about others’ triumphs.
Percy Julian High School student Shantell Steve didn’t know before Monday that the president would point out her life struggles in his speech, to help encourage the nation’s kids.
But after telling students point blank, “there’s no excuse for not trying,” Obama talked about how Steve had been bounced from foster home to foster home over the course of her young life, but she got a job in a health care center, works with youth to keep them away from gangs and looks forward to graduating from her South Side high school with honors, going on to college.
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AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
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