A seven-year-old California girl who has ADHD and loves drawing was allegedly disciplined and barred from drawing any pictures for her friends in school after she created a drawing emblazoned “Black Lives Matter” but wrote “any lives” beneath it.
According to the young child’s mother, she was never informed of the punishment meted out to her child and only discovered what had happened one year later when another parent enlightened her. In the aftermath of the incident, her daughter stopped drawing entirely.
“When I talked to my daughter — I think she said it was so sad. And I said, ‘Well, what did the principal say to you?’ and [she said] ‘I can’t draw pictures anymore. And I can’t write those words,’” Chelsea Boyle, whose daughter attended Viejo Elementary School in Mission Viejo, told Kira Davis of RedState in an exclusive interview.
Boyle’s first-grade daughter, who is white, drew a picture to represent her friends, who were racially mixed. The picture wound up going home with one of the young girl’s friends. Boyle told Davis that the parents of the friend informed the school that they found the picture offensive, prompting Viejo Elementary School principal Jesus Becerra to allegedly query Boyle’s daughter, followed by a required public apology from the young girl on the playground to her classmates and teachers.
In addition, Boyle’s daughter was barred from recess, instead reportedly forced to sit on a bench and watch the other children play.
Boyle, who has spent hundreds of hours volunteering to help the school, stated that she only found out about the issue and the punishment in March, 2022, from a mutual friend of hers and the offended family.
“My immediate reaction is just…I feel like I got hit by a bus, but I didn’t understand it,” she told Davis. “And I thought, ‘Oh, you know, my daughter has just been discriminated against.’ And I didn’t even want to contact a lawyer, but I just didn’t know what had happened to us.”
“My children see color as a color, as a description,” she continued. “I am trying to raise them the way the world should be, not the way it is. That’s how I’m trying to make my personal change. Her best friend is brown — not black, but brown — and she didn’t understand why she didn’t matter, why her friend didn’t matter. She has another friend that is Japanese; she doesn’t understand.:
“It was something she came up on her own,” Boyle said sadly. “She just didn’t understand it. It was completely innocent, and that broke my heart.”
Boyle only wanted an apology to her, her daughter, and even the offended family, but her lawyer, Alexander Haberbush of the LexRex Institute, said the powers-that-be claimed her story was false.
Haberbush told Davis, “It’s a compelled speech issue; obviously compelled speech is one of the toughest tests that they have to meet … We believe that there is no way that they can meet that standard and we believe this is an egregious deprivation of her rights and that Chelsea should be vindicated.”
“I hope when this podcast comes out that he sees, oh…she’s not dropping it,” Haberbush said of Becerra. “I’m serious. I don’t want this to happen to my kids. I don’t want it to happen to your kids.”
Source: Dailywire