We’ve gotten an interview response! Sadye responded to our emailed interview questions and gave us some unique insight as to what actually happened in the school. She told us about how To Kill A Mockingbird was taught in the school and what students reactions were to it. Based on her account, students knew the school’s reason for making the book required and understood the themes that were being taught. She said that some of the themes were racism, greed, and they looked at how children were portrayed in historical contexts.

She explained how she started the petition, which was just a word document. I had always thought there were steps you had to go through to make a petition, but it’s a lot easier than I thought. She told us how many people signed it and the general response to her going around school asking for signatures.

We also asked her about the petition getting taken away because we found differing news reports. Most of the articles said that the principal took it away while one said that the principal asked her not to do it during school. I had expected the version with the most news coverage to be correct but it wasn’t. She said that the principal took it away during school hours and told her to get signatures in another place. He had actually informed her that there was a protest going on where she could get more people to sign. While the version that multiple news told wasn’t technically wrong, they left out a lot of information that could affect how a person views the principal.

Sadye told us all about the protest and how she felt being there. She mentioned that the atmosphere wasn’t exactly what she had thought it would be. People were angrier than she expected and “it was a little more aggressive than I had hoped.” She had wanted to have more conversation and didn’t feel anger was conducive to that.

Her answers were really well written, which is always nice. She gave us a lot of information that we wouldn’t have gotten by just reading news articles because as I have found, they aren’t always accurate. I think that after this interview, I would like to push a bit harder to get Charles Knitter’s response. He said he would work on it last week but we have no yet received his answers. I think that because he is an adult, his perspective would be different than Sadye’s, which would round out our website a bit more.