To the editor:
This week, my family is moving across the country, and judging by the stuff happening in Kansas' education system, we're leaving none too soon.
Last week my 21-year-old son received a call from a former classmate at LHS talking about a planned retirement party for Stan Roth. Nick was surprised to hear that Mr. Roth was leaving teaching and feared that health problems might be causing Roth's early retirement.
After having read the Monday paper, I'm taking time out from packing to write a letter to the editor.
Stan Roth was one of the few faculty in the Lawrence public schools who is a "teacher." He was my son's favorite. He loved his subject and his teaching was creative and engaging. He has personality and a sense of humor.
My son went on several trips with Mr. Roth and loved all of them. He learned an enormous amount about the natural world and still remembers and uses that knowledge.
It frightens me that Mr. Roth was thrown out of our schools, apparently for all the reasons that my son loved him. He spoke his mind and was a little bit different from the homogeneous crowd of adults usually herding our kids through their overly long and usually vapid school days. He assumed that his students would understand what he taught, rather than assuming that they wouldn't, like most of our teachers, and he expressed surprise when they didn't.
So now he has been forced to stop doing what he loves and is good at because he expressed his opinion in his salty way, an opinion shared by scientists around the world, that school is not the place to teach creationism.
It now becomes clear how the local school boards will follow the orders of the state school board. Behind closed doors, with no notice, based upon secret documents not shown to the accused, they will purge all those teachers who oppose them.
Lawrence parents have been gloating since the state school board's decision about creationism. Those I spoke to said, "That won't happen in Lawrence. We have an educated school board." Well, wake up folks! It has happened. What are you going to do about it?
Maggie Wood,
Lawrence.
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