Standing toe to toe AGAINST the "Hate America First" crowd

My name is Ted Tedesco and I live in Woodbury, Vermont. The battle began on September 2, 2008 and still continues. That is the date of the letter I sent to the Woodbury, Vermont School Board informing them that the Pledge of Allegiance was no longer being recited within the school since the previous school year. At the time, I had two elementary school age children enrolled in the town school. More on that later. In the past, the Pledge had been relegated to the Wednesday morning school wide assembly, but now it had even been removed from there. Although the Principal, Michaela Martin, will not acknowledge she directed the ending to the recitation of the Pledge, it is my opinion that to believe otherwise would also require that you believe the Principal is unaware what is happening in a four classroom school with a weekly assembly attended by about 55 children and 5 teachers and staff, herself included. It is my opinion that if it had not been directed by her to cease, then surely one of the teachers would have informed her that the Pledge was no longer being recited. When you take into account the Principal's resistance to the return of the Pledge, as I will detail later, it is my opinion that it is plainly evident where she stands on the subject. Principal Martin is not a supporter of the recitation of the Pledge within the classroom. Enough said on that.

Those on the side of bringing the Pledge back to the public school classroom are now known as the Save the Pledge movement. They are composed of a wide cross-section of the town of Woodbury. Parents, grandparents and the equally important taxpayers who are frustrated to have lost control over what their tax dollars are failing to promote. Those on the other side, although lacking a name and unwilling to debate me or to truthfully represent their position except in the smallest of groups when they think they cannot be held accountable for their beliefs and expressions, wanted one thing and that was to keep the Pledge from being reestablished within the school. Notice I said wanted. There is a long story to tell here and much more work to do, but the Save the Pledge movement is winning. From the extreme left, this is a story of their deceit, their telling of untruths, their attempted character assassinations, their suggestion that the school might be the scene of a shooting which the pro Pledge movement would be responsible for (currently under police investigation), the destruction of the political career of the Chair of the School Board who thought she could resist the will of the people to satisfy the ideological extreme left (she badly lost a minor local election on November 4 for a Justice of the Peace position and now has little hope of making it to the State Legislature in 2010, something I know she wanted very badly as she told me herself) and ended friendships when the willing dupes of the extreme left found themselves isolated from their mainstream and patriotic fellow residents of Woodbury.

Back to the fight! More posts to follow.