A 10-year-old student was kicked out of a virtual class in Tacoma, Washington, for saying the person he admired most in the world is President Donald Trump.
“I admire Donald J. Trump because he is making America great again,” the student wrote. “And because he is the best president the United States of America could ever, ever have. And he built the wall so terrorists couldn’t come into in the U.S. Trump is the best person in the world. And that’s why I had admire him.”
His sixth-grade teacher, Brendan Stanton, promptly kicked the student out of the class chat and deleted the response.
The boy then got his mother, Elsy Kusander, who began recording Stanton as he explained to the class why her son’s answer was not “appropriate.”
“The example that was shared in the chat, which I went ahead and erased for us, was not appropriate right?” Stanton said. “Especially as that individual has created so much division and hatred between people and specifically spoken hatred to many different individuals, ok? Again, that individual has spoken hate to many individuals, and I don’t think is an appropriate example for a role model that we should be admiring.”
Kusander was troubled, she told local radio station KTTH, and she recorded a subsequent phone call she had with Stanton.
Stanton told Kusander that the assignment was about computer scientists and began to deride the President’s positions on immigration during the call, telling Kusander, “We know that our neighbors at the southern border are not all terrorists, right?”
Kusander told Stanton that she had emigrated to the U.S. from Honduras and told him she was in fact, against illegal immigration. She also explained that she had recorded his words earlier in the day during the class session, at which point he appeared to become contrite.
“I do apologize if my words were not perfect at the time,” said Stanton. “If I used…if I said that Trump was ‘hateful and divisive,’ that may have been what I used at the time, but my purpose was in bringing us back to the conversation of computer scientists and the positive role that they’ve played in our history.”
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