Good Morning America & my letter to the editor

Wilton Bulletin
Editorial Page


Dear Editor:

I am a 1988 graduate of Wilton High School. I valued my education at Wilton so much that I knew I wanted to be a high school teacher by the time graduation rolled around. In fact, in my senior year I facilitated a theater class for my peers because we did not have a theater teacher on staff. During the last months of high school in 1988 twenty-five of us wrote a play and performed it during lunch hours. No credit. No grade. We just had something to say.

I have now been teaching at Clayton High School in St. Louis, Missouri, for eight years. Clayton has a very similar demographic to Wilton. I read about the “dramatic” conflict at Wilton High just this morning. I was appalled and slightly embarrassed to admit that this was MY high school. I was proud, however, to admit that these were the “theater kids” at my alma mater who, like me, just had something to say. The difference is that twenty years ago I don’t remember an administrator even reading our script prior to performance, but today, these students are not just being censored; they’re being systematically silenced.

I immediately downloaded the Voices in Conflict script for my first day back from spring break. I have just finished reading it with my Advanced Acting class. My students, assessing the script as well-balanced and fluid, could not believe that the production of this script would be stopped. Most of my students are themselves currently in a production that I have co-written about a 73-year-old priest who is in prison for protesting against nuclear weapons. It is a politically and religiously charged play that we produced at Clayton High School to sold-out houses and are taking to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer in Scotland. (www.andcarllaughed.com)

Unlike Wilton’s Voices, our play was welcomed by the administration and Board of Education, who have made it their mission to support student free speech. In fact, Clayton students and administration worked together to pen an award winning policy that supports students’ freedom of speech “on a level that is almost unrivalled nationally.” (Student Press Law Center, 2002) The policy reads, “Because Clayton High School student journalists historically have exercised their powers and skills in a responsible, respectful and appropriate manner, the board encourages the administration to allow its student journalists to function with minimal oversight consistent with the trust and respect that its student journalists have earned.”

I live in the Midwest, and while we in the Midwest have been the butt of many jokes about unsophisticated conservatism, how sad that, as one of the top high schools in the country, Wilton does not trust and respect students enough to see when they are being intellectually responsible in exercising their right to engage a community in honest dialogue.

I hereby publicly invite the cast of Voices in Conflict to come and perform their wonderful script here at Clayton High School in St. Louis in conjunction with my own students in our play about peace. We would welcome you with open minds.

To everyone involved, be glad that the youth of our nation care.

Respectfully,

Kelley Anderson Ryan, Wilton Class of ’88