PHILADELPHIA – A high school sophomore says her geometry teacher bullied her for wearing a Mitt Romney t-shirt to class last Friday.
Sixteen-year-old Samantha Pawlucy used “dress-down” day at Charles Carroll High School to show support for the Republican presidential hopeful. She decided to support Romney after researching both candidates, and deciding that Romney’s opposition against partial birth abortion matched her views.
But when she showed up to math class wearing her Romney/Ryan shirt, Pawlucy was “embarrassed and shocked” by her teacher’s over-the-top reaction, reports Philly.com.
“The teacher told me to get out of the classroom, I said no,” Pawlucy told NBC 10.
“She told me to take off my shirt and said that she has another one if I need one. And then the teacher asked me… ‘Are your parents Republican?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ She said that’s like her wearing a KKK shirt,” Pawlucy said.
The teacher informed her that Carroll was a “Democratic school,” and called a nonteaching assistant into the classroom who tried to write on the t-shirt with a marker, Pawlucy said.
“I was really embarrassed and shocked,” Pawlucy told Philly.com. “I didn’t think she’d go into the hallway and scream to everyone. It wasn’t scary, but it felt weird.”
Her parents reported the incident to the school principal, who met with the teacher and parents on Monday. During the meeting, the teacher explained that she had been joking, but later stormed out of the meeting and left the school.
Against all logic, the unidentified teacher continued her bullying behavior the next day in class.
When Pawlucy went back to her geometry class on Tuesday, the teacher told students she could no longer joke with them because a student had gotten her in trouble, reports Philly.com.
“The teen said she was so upset by the teacher’s comments that she left the classroom and hid in the bathroom until the end of class,” the news site reports.
Pawlucy says some of her friends have stopped talking to her because she reported the teacher’s behavior to the principal.
The teacher has since been assigned to teach another class, and school authorities are conducting an investigation into the matter.
While they’re trying to get to the bottom of the t-shirt incident, we hope district officials also investigate how this institution of learning could employ such a close-minded, intolerant individual as a teacher.
This episode is about far more than politics – it gets to the heart of why public education even exists. Taxpayers fund public schools to help children develop the thinking and reasoning skills that are necessary to perpetuate our democratic republic. That even supersedes the need to prepare students for competing in the global economy.
So instead of humiliating Pawlucy for her views, the teacher should have praised the student for researching the issues and the candidates on her own. After all, how many 16-year-olds log off Facebook long enough to know there’s even a presidential campaign happening all around them?
But this teacher apparently disregarded all of that in order to mock a student for not thinking the “right” way. That doesn’t speak well of the learning culture in the Philadelphia school district.
We salute Pawlucy and her parents for standing up to her overzealous teacher. This kind of indoctrination and bullying nonsense is only going to stop if more students and parents have enough courage to speak out against the leftist bullies who currently control public education.
As the Carroll High School principal told Philly.com, the investigation all started “with the simple action of the parent calling the principal and complaining.”
Parents across the nation should take this example and run with it.
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