Op/Ed article ~February 12,2010

I chose to write on the article entitled “Principal forbids 5th grader to wear Obama shirt to school” off of the WISTV web site. The article is about a school in Sumter South Carolina that forbid its’ students to wear political paraphernalia to school until the president Obama was sworn in.
There has been a lot of debate surrounding this decision. One of the arguments was that they were not allowed to wear those t- shirts and other paraphernalia because the president is black and therefore the people in the state of South Carolina are racist because they do not want black people to rub it in that they have a black person in office. Another argument is that if the fifth grader did wear that shirt to school that he would have been expelled and people didn’t see why he would have been punished for just wearing a shirt.
This is where I start to get an opinion because of my future career. In Elementary school, when something happens or if they don’t want something to happen, the staff of the school is really good at notifying parents of these happenings. With proper warning from the school of what will happen if you do something against their will, and the student still decides to do it, I believe that the student and the parents have full responsibility to accept all punishment. The argument was that he was just in fifth grade and he didn’t know any better. Last time I checked, children learned how to read in kindergarten and sometimes even before then. Therefore the student should have been able to read the notification sent home and also been able to comprehend that it was against the rules for him to wear such a t- shirt.


That's all for now!
~Ali