Students Who Want To Say Pledge Are Kicked Out Of Class

We’ve had these kind of lefties around for quite some time but now that the biggest lefty of them all has been elected President we can expect more of this kind of stuff: (h/t Weasel Zippers)

No one is sure when daily recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance fell by the wayside at Woodbury Elementary School.

But efforts to restore them have erupted into a bitter dispute in this town of about 800 residents, with school officials blocking the exercise from classrooms over concerns that it holds children who don’t participate up to scorn.

U.S. schoolchildren have long been able to opt out of reciting the pledge for religious reasons. But unlike other pledge controversies, this one centers on how and where schoolchildren say it, not whether they should.

“The whole thing is tearing our community apart,” said Heather Lanphear, 39, the mother of a first-grader and an opponent of reciting the pledge in the classroom.

The brouhaha in the Vermont school began in September, when parent Ted Tedesco began circulating petitions calling for the return of pledge recitation as a daily practice in the 19th-century schoolhouse, which has 55 children in kindergarten through sixth grade.

School officials agreed to resume it as a daily exercise, but not in the classroom.

“We don’t want to isolate children every day in their own classroom or make them feel they’re different,” said Principal Michaela Martin.

Instead, starting last week, a sixth-grade student was assigned to go around to the four classrooms before classes started, gathering anyone who wanted to say it and then walking them up creaky wooden steps to a second-floor gymnasium, where he led them in the pledge.

About half the students chose to participate, Martin said.

Tedesco, 55, a retired Marine Corps major, and others who signed his petitions didn’t like that solution, calling it disruptive and inappropriate because it put young children in the position of having to decide between pre-class play time and leaving the classroom to say the pledge.

“Saying the pledge in the classroom is legal, convenient and traditional,” Tedesco said. “Asking kindergarten through sixth-graders who want to say the pledge to leave their classrooms to do so is neither convenient nor traditional.”

The Principal doesn’t want the children who want to leave when the pledge is said to feel different so what does she do? She forces the children who DO want to say the pledge to leave, making them feel different. It’s ok when a right-wing fanatic child is isolated you see.

Sigh….

If a sixth grader has a problem saying it for political or religious reasons, such as saying “under God”, then they can not say that line. Simple fix. But to force those out of the classroom who do want to Pledge Allegiance to this great country is just so….well, Obamian.

Curt

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