There is always, always two sides to every story – in just about any circumstance in life, be it personal or business or whatever – the only exception being when it comes to the health and safety of our children – there’s little room for error and no allowance for risk.

There has been quite the controversy and finger pointing over the City of Somerville and the School Department’s involvement in the decision to not issue a permit for the ‚ÄúHip Hop Concert for Justice‚Äù organized by Centro Presente this past week. The finger pointing indirectly insinuates that the decision was made arbitrarily by a community that just didn’t want them in their city and that we influenced Cambridge to do the same thing.

That kind of convenient accusation might wash if this was 1958, but not in 2008 – and certainly not with the mayor we have and the extraordinarily diverse school department that we have. You only have to look at the record of outreach our community has done in the past few years to youth organizations, especially from the immigrant part of our community to understand that this wasn’t a simple or unmeaning decision.

We just had the Teen Empowerment summit a few weeks ago and Somerville was named of the nation’s ‚Äú100 Best Communities for Youth‚Äù by the America’s Promise Alliance. That happened here because we as a community do care, especially about our youth – which is why we have a permitting process in place which does indeed scrutinize every last detail to ensure that the health and safety of our children is the absolute number one priority to us all.

Anyone who believes that any group or any individual should be permitted to run any kind of event involving our youth merely because they had the best “intentions” should have their heads examined.

Our community deserves better, our kids deserve better and our local officials who are entrusted to make these kinds of decisions deserve better – which is why Mayor Curtatone should be praised for reaching out to Centro Presente in the wake of the all the confusion and inviting them to come back to this community to work on future events together.