A 7-year-old girl who deviated from the acceptable language allowed by school officials when describing Black Lives Matter was punished by her California school.
But parent Chelsea Boyle is fighting back after her daughter was disciplined for putting “any life” under the words “Black Lives Mater” in a drawing, according to Fox News.
RedState reported Monday that the issue began in 2021 when the parents of a friend of Boyle’s daughter saw the drawing and complained.
Boyle said Jesus Becerra, the principal of Viejo Elementary School in Mission Viejo, forced the girl, then in the first grade, to make a public apology.
To drive home the point that deviation from prescribed language about race is not allowed, the child was denied recess time.
Exclusive: CA First-Grader Disciplined, Harassed By School Officials For Writing ‘Any Lives’ Matter on BLM Drawing https://t.co/rKGkafkwUa
— Kira (@RealKiraDavis) July 11, 2022
Boyle, however, knew nothing of this until she heard about it from another parent in March, roughly a year after the incident.
“My immediate reaction is just … I feel like I got hit by a bus, but I didn’t understand it. And I thought, oh, you know, my daughter has just been discriminated against. And I didn’t even want to contact a lawyer, but I just didn’t know what had happened to us,” she said, according to RedState.
Should the principal be fired?
At that point, Boyle asked her daughter about the incident.
“And then when I talked to my daughter — I think she said it was so sad. … And I said, ‘Well, what did the principal say to you?’ and [she said], ‘I can’t draw pictures anymore. And I can’t write those words.’ And I said, ‘Why did you write [those words]?’
“I don’t teach [about] Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, [or] anything in my house because I think my children are too young [for politics]. My children see color as a color, as a description. I am trying to raise them the way the world should be, not the way it is. That’s how I’m trying to make my personal change.
“[H]er best friend is brown — not black, but brown — and she didn’t understand why she didn’t matter, why her friend didn’t matter. She has another friend that is Japanese; she doesn’t understand.”
Boyle said that the wording was not even a variant that has raised hackles with the woke community.
“It wasn’t ‘all lives matter,’ it was ‘any life.’ It was something she came up on her own. She just didn’t understand it. It was completely innocent, and that broke my heart,” the girl’s mother said.
Boyle asked the school for an apology. She did not even get a response.
Alexander Haberbush, her lawyer, said the school just dismissed her concerns, Fox News reported.
Haberbush said a lawsuit could be brought against the Capistrano Unified School District, but he and Boyle are “trying to give the school every opportunity to settle this amicably.”
But they have “not heard a word from the school,” he said.
“Their silence is unacceptable,” Haberbush said in a statement to Fox News, adding that the school’s action was “a flagrant violation of the First Amendment rights of a student placed in their care.”
“As a child with ADHD, art is Ms. Boyle’s daughter’s main emotional outlet. The school has deprived her of that, and for what? For having the audacity to draw kids of all races getting along with the words ‘black lives matter,’ ‘any life’ matters,” he said.
Apparently freedom of speech doesn’t apply to kids ??♂️
— Shawn Nairn (@ShawnNairn) July 12, 2022
Haberbush said his law firm “will do everything in its power to ensure that Ms. Boyle’s voice and her daughter’s voice are heard and that the school acknowledges its wrongdoing.”
In a statement to Fox News, Viejo Elementary School said “personnel have been working with the family to investigate and address their concerns” and the complaint process is ongoing.
Be the first to comment