IF THE PROTESTERS really care about potentially negative influences on impressionable schoolchildren, I wonder whether they thought about students' reaction to yesterday's demonstration outside their grade school.

B. Bernice Young Elementary School, in Burlington Township, N.J., goes up only through the second grade, so the students enrolled there are really young. What did all of those innocent babies know about the disgruntled adults who converged outside? Were they even aware of what was going on?

Demonstrators gathered about 9 a.m. after the majority of the students presumably were inside. School administrators pulled down shades to block out the sight of what was happening. But who knows for sure if that was enough to shield the kids from what was taking place outside their school.

An organizer told me that they weren't "particularly noisy" but as much as you can try to pretend everything's normal, kids have a way of sensing when something's amiss. They pick it up in the body language of their teachers and parents.

Protesters, who converged outside their school, were provoked by a YouTube video that surfaced in September of the school's students performing two songs in tribute to President Obama. The lyrics of one song say, in part,

"He said take a stand, make sure everyone gets a chance.

Mmm, mmm, mmm, Barack Hussein Obama.

He said red, yellow, black and white, all are equal in his sight."

Another song includes the phrase "Hooray Mr. President."

The songs were performed as part of a school program last February, during Black History Month. But the video didn't make headlines until September. Once it did, it quickly went viral as conservative commentators Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin and others kicked up a nationwide fuss, complaining that the songs unfairly indoctrinated kids.

Republican National Committee head Michael Steele jumped into the dustup, accusing the songs of being akin to "the type of propaganda you see in Stalin's Russia." All of this outrage and indignation was set against the ugly backlash around Obama's first-day-of- school speech to the nation's children, which opponents claimed was an effort to influence young minds.

Last week, the Burlington County School District sent an e-mail warning parents of yesterday's planned demonstration. It read, in part, "Our school district does not believe that protesting in front of an elementary school in session with 4-to 7-year-old children is appropriate. This is disruptive to the education of the children and could be intimidating for the children."

School officials attempted to head it off, to no avail.

What I want to know is: Who were the protests directed against? The teacher who led the songs in question has retired. Protest organizer Bill Haney, 63, a retired sales and marketing executive who lives in Tabernacle Township, said he wanted to send a message to school administrators.

"If it was done in Black History Month and it was done about Martin Luther King, one wouldn't have any kind of concerns because Martin Luther King is truly a historic figure," Haney told me. "[With] Barack Obama, the book hasn't been written about that man."

When I asked Haney, who is the organizer of 9.12 Project Burlington County, whether what the protesters were doing was fair to the schoolchildren, he said: "The answer to that is we are outside the school. We are across the street without any opportunity for the children to be involved with us."

For the sake of the children, let's hope he was right.

Send e-mail to heyjen@phillynews.com. My blog: http://go.philly.com/heyjen.