A Philadelphia high schooler says she was humiliated after her teacher told her to remove a Mitt Romney T-shirt she was wearing, comparing it to “wearing a KKK shirt.”
Samantha Pawlucy, a 16-year-old sophomore at Charles Carroll High School in the Port Richmond section of the city, says she wore a pink Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan T-shirt last Friday during the school's dress-down day.
No one made an issue of Samantha’s political T-shirt until she got to geometry class.
"The teacher told me to get out of the classroom, I said no," Samantha said.
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"She told me to take off my shirt and said that she has another one if I need one. And then the teacher asked me… 'Are your parents Republican?' I said, 'I don't know.' She said that's like her wearing a KKK shirt."
Samantha was so embarrassed by the public criticism in front of her classmates that she told her parents she didn’t want to return to school.
"I didn't know what to think, I didn't think it was right at all."
They requested a meeting with the principal and the teacher. The teacher apologized to Samantha and her parents saying that the statement was meant as a joke.
"It was funny to her, but I was really embarrassed," Samantha said.
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"If it was a joke between two adults, I can take a joke like that but (my daughter) didn't know how to take it. She doesn’t understand, she actually thinks she did something wrong," her father, Richard Pawlucy, said.
"I can just picture her sitting there, feeling ashamed for just wearing a T-shirt," said her mother, Christine Pawlucy. "That someone could spin that and throw it back on a 16-year-old child and make her feel so terrible."
A spokesperson for the Philadelphia School District told NBCPhiladelphia.com that the teacher was transferred to another classroom as the district investigates the incident.
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