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MS . PEMBERTON :
Members of the school board , please reconsider your decision . Our students are seeing , hearing and yearning to understand what they find troubling in our own society today . This musical is a way we can help channel their fears , and have them discuss and ask questions they may otherwise not ask ! Through this musical , they ' ve learned about the ill-treatment of gypsies in Hugo ' s novel . They see similarities between what happened then to what ' s happening now with our own government ' s inhuman treatment of immigrants at our borders . They are becoming aware of the importance of history : that the politics of the present can ' t be disengaged from the past . Correlations are being made , good questions are being asked ; please , don ' t stifle their learning .