Apparently, you're either American, or you're nothing. That is the message of the Faith Fellowship Christian School of Watertown, NY.
These "christian" souls have been pointing out to a student with dual citizenship that it's as bad to be Canadian as it is to be, well, I don't know, Black? Latino? Gay? Muslim?
A 15-year-old boy in Upstate New York alleges that two of his teachers teased him so much about being Canadian that he became depressed, prompting his mother to pull him out of school.
“They’d say things like ‘Canada’s full of communists. They club baby seals. That my opinion doesn’t really matter because I’m a Canadian,’” Noah Kilpatrick said by phone from Watertown, N.Y.
“The first couple times I thought it was joking, and then it just kept going, even after I said, ‘Hey, I’m just as American as you are, I have dual citizenship.’ They still didn’t care and they kept doing it.”
Noah was born in the Ottawa area but his family moved to the United States about nine years ago.
The Grade 10 student said he used to love attending Faith Fellowship Christian School. But last fall two of his teachers began teasing him about his “Canadian heritage,” he said
“It went on for month, after month,” said Noah’s mother, Tina Kilpatrick, who eventually asked her son to start keeping a log of what was said in the classroom about his nationality.
When fellow students eventually began to follow the teachers’ lead and join in on the bullying, Kilpatrick said she decided it was time to speak to the school’s lead pastor, Mike Bartholomew, who acts as superintendent. She told him that she believed Noah had become depressed as a result of how he was being treated.
'I tried to resolve it privately'
Kilpatrick said she later received a phone call from Bartholomew, saying he had ordered the two teachers to leave Noah alone for the rest of the school year.
But when Noah returned the next day, he felt the teachers were ignoring him.
“Now it’s the complete opposite — OK you didn’t bug him today about being Canadian but now he still feels ostracized and punished for what he did, instead of righting a wrong,” Kilpatrick said.
“I tried to resolve it privately and it didn’t happen,” she said, so she decided to pull Noah out of the school in mid-May, and then approached a local TV station about the ordeal.
CBC News contacted Faith Fellowship Christian School and was told that officials aren’t commenting on the matter.
However, a statement attributed to Bartholomew in local media reports, said: “We at Faith Fellowship Christian School have always made it our policy not to discuss the affairs of students or their families in public venues."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/06/13/canadian-teen-new-york-school-teachers.html
These "christian" souls have been pointing out to a student with dual citizenship that it's as bad to be Canadian as it is to be, well, I don't know, Black? Latino? Gay? Muslim?
A 15-year-old boy in Upstate New York alleges that two of his teachers teased him so much about being Canadian that he became depressed, prompting his mother to pull him out of school.
“They’d say things like ‘Canada’s full of communists. They club baby seals. That my opinion doesn’t really matter because I’m a Canadian,’” Noah Kilpatrick said by phone from Watertown, N.Y.
“The first couple times I thought it was joking, and then it just kept going, even after I said, ‘Hey, I’m just as American as you are, I have dual citizenship.’ They still didn’t care and they kept doing it.”
Noah was born in the Ottawa area but his family moved to the United States about nine years ago.
The Grade 10 student said he used to love attending Faith Fellowship Christian School. But last fall two of his teachers began teasing him about his “Canadian heritage,” he said
“It went on for month, after month,” said Noah’s mother, Tina Kilpatrick, who eventually asked her son to start keeping a log of what was said in the classroom about his nationality.
When fellow students eventually began to follow the teachers’ lead and join in on the bullying, Kilpatrick said she decided it was time to speak to the school’s lead pastor, Mike Bartholomew, who acts as superintendent. She told him that she believed Noah had become depressed as a result of how he was being treated.
'I tried to resolve it privately'
Kilpatrick said she later received a phone call from Bartholomew, saying he had ordered the two teachers to leave Noah alone for the rest of the school year.
But when Noah returned the next day, he felt the teachers were ignoring him.
“Now it’s the complete opposite — OK you didn’t bug him today about being Canadian but now he still feels ostracized and punished for what he did, instead of righting a wrong,” Kilpatrick said.
“I tried to resolve it privately and it didn’t happen,” she said, so she decided to pull Noah out of the school in mid-May, and then approached a local TV station about the ordeal.
CBC News contacted Faith Fellowship Christian School and was told that officials aren’t commenting on the matter.
However, a statement attributed to Bartholomew in local media reports, said: “We at Faith Fellowship Christian School have always made it our policy not to discuss the affairs of students or their families in public venues."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/06/13/canadian-teen-new-york-school-teachers.html
