School apologizes for forcing student to remove NRA tee shirt

A California school principal is forcing her staff to apologize to a student and undergo training for wrongly forcing a girl to change out of a NRA tee shirt.

On Thursday, the school changed course, apologized to the 16-year-old and said campus staff will be trained so that “an incident like this does not occur again.”

The T-shirt was white with an American flag and a silhouette of a hunter with a rifle and the slogan: “National Rifle Association of America, Protecting America’s Traditions Since 1871.”

In asking the student to remove the shirt, school officials said the depiction of the rifle was a violation of the school’s dress code.

When the student’s parents wrote to the principal, suggesting that administrators had infringed on their daughter’s constitutional rights, Principal Kimberly Fricker responded by sending the parents the school’s policy on clothing that depicts violence.

The school’s dress code prohibits clothing that promotes or depicts violence, criminal activity and anything that’s degrading to ethnic values, among other restrictions.

However, after reviewing the images on the shirt, Fricker concluded that it didn’t promote violence, the Orange Unified School District said in a statement.

Advertisement

We’re glad that the story of Haley Bullwinkle that we reported upon yesterday has a happy ending, but don’t think for a moment that it would have ended up this way without significant pressure being brought against the school.

The only way to preserve our rights is to make sure that we don’t allow them to be infringed upon, a lesson for both the students and staff involved in this incident.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member