Few students in Bedford watched Barack Obama’s first-day-of-school address, but not for political reasons.

School officials decided it was not possible to watch the video district-wide because of scheduling conflicts, but that teachers could individually decide if they wanted to provide the video for their students.

Teachers were directed to prepare an alternate activity if they were to show the video, in case there were students whose parents did not want their child to watch the address.

McKelvie Intermediate School Principal Michael Fournier said he received about a half dozen phone calls from parents concerned about the speech.

“I was surprised. I was expecting the speech to be relatively benign, challenging students to do their best,” said Fournier. “We didn’t receive a lot of calls, but enough to make us pause and think about what the concerns were.”

When news about the speech, which aired on Tuesday, Sept. 8, broke, there was controversy nationally about what Obama’s intentions were.

The content of the speech was released in advance, which eased some tension by showing the president was not pushing a political agenda.

“Every single one of you has something that you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer,” Obama said in the address. “You have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is.”

Lurgio Middle School principal Ed Joyce said the video was not shown to his eighth grade students, but mostly because of scheduling conflicts, while it did fit into his seventh-grade planning better.

“A lot of the controversy came from the unknown,” said Joyce. “I think now that he released the speech in advance, it eased that a bit.”

Fournier said another issue with showing the video to all students was that it would need to be streamed, and with 750 students it may have been difficult to do because of the technological aspect.

Some teachers planned on previewing the speech and showing it to the class on a different day, rather than showing it live if it fit into the social studies curriculum.

“I think when the president wants to give a message to the kids, it’s appropriate for us to be able to watch it, but the timing was the difficult piece,” said Fournier. “The vast majority of people in Bedford hold the values expressed in the speech, so I think he is reiterating the expectations of the main part of our town.”