Love it when the good kids win in the end…
A 9-year-old Donald Trump supporter who was told by the vice principal of his school to remove his “Make America Great Again” hat because it “brings negative attention from other students” left school Thursday with permission of his relatives, went to a rally Friday and got his hat signed by Trump.
Logan Autry of Fresno, Calif., is telling the story of what happened at Powers-Ginsburg Elementary School on Thursday, where the vice principal walked up to him and told him to take off his hat.
“The vice principal came up to me and told me to take my hat off because it brings negative attention from other students. And I said no a few times, and then the principal told me again, and I still said no and refused,” he said.
Autry said he refused to remove it because it’s his favorite hat and the First Amendment says he can wear it.
“It’s my favorite hat. The First Amendment says I can wear my hat,” Autry told KSEE-TV. “I still want to keep my hat. It’s not the hat that draws attention; it’s just my personality that the other children do not like.”
Autry, who says he wants to be a politician when he grows up, said while other students were calling Trump “stupid,” he was busy explaining what Trump actually wants to do as president.
“I’ve told them his policies on illegal immigration, and our Second Amendment, and our First Amendment and all of our amendments that need to be protected, which are not going to be an amendment at all if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders gets elected,” he said.
The most interesting thing of all, though, was that Autry left school after his encounter with the vice principal only to get a front row seat at a Trump rally the next day.
At that rally, Autry got his hat signed by Trump, shook his hand and discovered that the Republican nominee’s hair is real.
“I got to shake his hand and I felt his hair too, and it’s actually real. On the TV it looks not real, but it like, has a blur, but when you see it in real life, it looks a lot different,” he said.
As for the school, Superintendent Michael Hanson said in a statement Monday that Autry was not banned from wearing his hat but asked to “temporarily remove his hat only after there was an incident of substantial disruption.”
The full statement is below:
Our job as educators is to facilitate a safe learning environment where we encourage robust conversations of diverse ideas and thoughts. We are proud that in this case our school achieved that goal by allowing the student to wear his hat for several days and engage in conversations with classmates.
It is also our responsibility to take precautions when the discourse begins to impact our school climate and interrupt school operations.
The student was asked to temporarily remove his hat only after there was an incident of substantial disruption. However, to be clear, school officials never imposed an outright ban. The student was not banned from school and was never banned from wearing the hat. School officials reached out multiple times to the guardians to inform them that the student could continue to wear the hat as long there were no further incidents of disruption. However, the guardians have not responded.