Farewell Sidwell

Growing up is hard to do, and I worry about the Obama children. In addition to normal problems, they must make the adjustment from private to public life, and more particularly from their comfortable Chicago school to toney Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D. C., a private establishment for the care and education of young men and women. My specific concern is that coming from Chicago, the young Obama ladies may not have learned, as their current classmates certainly have, that they should not hang out with the wrong sort of people.

In this case, the wrong sort would be those children at Sidwell who benefit from D.C.'s school voucher program. This has been an amazingly successful program that for more than six years has subsidized the poor and impoverished of Washington so that their children might get an education comparable to that usually reserved for Washington elites.

These voucherized children are not in any sense bad; it's just that they are so temporary. Mr. Obama's compatriot from Illinois, Senator Dick Durbin, recently sponsored legislation to effectively close down D.C.'s school voucher program this year. As a result, all of these children will soon be sent back through the metal detectors of the public schools.

A sense of stability is what a young child needs these days, and to lose friends in their first year in Washington could be quite traumatic for the Obama children. I therefore hope that their parents have given them the appropriate instructions about the right and wrong sort of people, as defined, of course, by their kindly old Uncle Durbin.

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