OAN’s Abril Elfi
5:18 PM – Wednesday, August 30, 2023
A middle school student in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was suspended for wearing a “don’t tread on me” flag patch on his backpack.
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A video which started circulating on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, showed a 12-year-old and his mother talking to an administrator from school who claimed that the flag needed to be removed since the patch was “disruptive to the classroom environment,” as she claimed it has “origins with slavery.”
“So the reason that they do not want the flag – the reason we do not want the flag displayed – is due to its origins with slavery, and the slave trade,” said the administrator.
The seventh grader was reportedly told that the patch was against district policy and that he couldn’t return to class until he removed it.
His mother, on the other hand, was quick to defend her son, arguing that the flag originated during the American Revolution as a symbol of the 13 colonies’ fight against the British Crown and did not advocate slavery.
“It has nothing to do with slavery, that’s like the Revolutionary War patch that was displayed when they were fighting the British,” the mother said.
The administrator then stated that she is there just to enforce the district’s policy and that the mother has the right not to agree with it but the backpack cannot return to the classroom with the patch on it.
The staff member said she would put Jaiden’s mother in touch with Jeff Yocum, the Vanguard School’s director of operations, as he is the one who banned the flag in the district.
Yocum quoted graphic design specialist Paul Bruski on the flags associations with racism.
“Because of its creator’s history and because it is commonly flown alongside ‘Trump 2020’ flags, the Confederate battle flag and other white-supremacist flags, some may now see the Gadsden flag as a symbol of intolerance and hate or even racism,” said Bruski.
Yocum also stated an article about a disagreement with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after a Postal Service employee wore a Gadsden Flag cap to work which amounted to racial discrimination.
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