Trustee Joe Van De Rostyne countered, “All the letters I’ve received are endorsing our actions to keep it open. What do you tell those taxpayers?”
The governor also told the board that the state library could begin restoring the Teen Center site from what Rounds characterized as its “timeout” as the content of each page is approved by Secretary of Education Rick Melmer. “It seems pretty easy” to get a link on the teen site, but “it seems awfully difficult to remove it,” Melmer said in the August 4 Sioux Falls Argus Leader.
Despite the governor’s vow to weigh every external link, he has already decided that the library may not resume pointing to Columbia University’s Go Ask Alice health site or Planned Parenthood’s Teenwire.com, the latter because its content is “very, very political in nature.”
“Teenwire is not about politics; it’s about providing factual information and helping teens make healthy choices,” Kate Looby, South Dakota director of Planned Parenthood retorted. It was Rounds’s objection to the Teenwire.com link, following a complaint from Sioux Falls Catholic Bishop Robert Carlson in a May 12 letter, that triggered the governor’s action.
Posted August 6, 2004.