The Bell Curve:

Last week I ended my column with a note that I had planned to explore public reaction in the Newport-Mesa school district to President Obama’s pep talk with the nation’s school kids, but my phone calls weren’t returned before deadline.

So let’s start today by putting that right. I have since talked at length with the district’s spokeswoman, Laura Boss. Due to some sort of glitch, she didn’t receive my messages. Technology failed us.

So first and foremost, she wanted to stress that the solution adopted by the district that allows the teachers and principals at each school to arrange the showing — or non-showing — in line with their own special problems and technology was reached before the program was made public.

She also stressed the point made by Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard that Newport-Mesa had no direct communication from the federal secretary of education about Obama’s planned speech and learned of it from another district when it was not possible to make the necessary arrangements to cover the whole district in real time. As a result, all of the public reaction came after the program was already in place and had zero influence on its nature.

When public reaction did come, Boss said it was difficult to measure because it was split between the district and specific schools where callers had children enrolled.

When I pressed her for numbers, Boss estimated some 30 to 40 phone calls to the district and about 75 e-mails over the weekend after the talk.

The callers were about evenly divided in supporting or condemning the talk, but on one note they were in total agreement. Neither side liked the solution reached by the district. Supporters wanted the talk to reach all students en masse as closely as possible to real time. And the disenchanted didn’t want it to be offered at all. Like the health-care division, it came off as another microcosm of our country today.

So, finally, I asked how the district would have resolved this matter if it had been given appropriate time to prepare.

“Under proper circumstances our decision would have been the same — to let each principal and their teachers decide,” Boss said. “This would give the teachers an opportunity to speak out. They know what arrangements are possible and how they fit into the school’s curriculum.”