Mocked for his red-and-white gym gear and derided for hailing from a nation of seal clubbers, an Ottawa-born teenager says he dropped out of a Christian school in Upstate New York because staff relentlessly teased him over his Canadian background.
“I think it started as joking and then it went too far,” said Noah Kilpatrick, speaking by phone from Watertown, New York.
Attending Faith Fellowship Christian School was otherwise fine, said Noah, but in class the teacher would often lampoon Canada as a cartoonishly small country filled with communists and people who club seals for fun.
“History class and sometimes math class … they were stereotyping Canadians and saying we were all stupid — it was offensive,” he said.
When Noah paid for his school lunch with a toonie after forgetting to bring greenbacks (the two currencies were at par, he noted later), the same teacher, who is also the school’s principal, allegedly held up the coin at an assembly to publicly remind students that toonies are not legal tender.
“Of course, everybody looked at Noah. … Why not take the kid aside and be concerned why the kid has no lunch?” said his mother, Tina Kilpatrick, owner of Brushstrokes, a Watertown face-painting contractor.
“In class, Noah would make a comment and the [teacher] would say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s because you’re Canadian’ — those things aren’t funny,” she added.
[...]
Increasingly alarmed at the encounters (which Noah had begun to catalogue in verbatim in his notebook), Ms. Kilpatrick said she began requesting a meeting with school administration.
Instead, she said, the school’s pastor simply assured her that he had “commanded” the staff in question to leave Noah alone until the end of the year.
“But then it seemed like they were completely ignoring me — I felt like an outcast,” said Noah.
Alleging that her attempts to follow up on the matter were rebuffed, Ms. Kilpatrick said she immediately pulled Noah from the school then took the story to a local TV affiliate.
“[The principal] would make fun of the way I dressed and he’d say, ‘Oh, you’re wearing Canadian colours,’ and I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I am. Thanks, Mr. Curinga.’ He’d say, ‘That wasn’t a compliment,’” said Noah, dressed in a T-shirt emblazoned with a waving U.S. flag, appearing in the Tuesday night broadcast.
[...]
Regardless, amid the community backlash caused by the story, Ms. Kilpatrick said she is mulling a move back to Canada.
“This is so intense right now that if it stays this way … if we feel ostracized this way, then we won’t stay,” she said.
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I mean... huh? Teachers bully kid for weird reason, kid's mother goes to the media with it since the administration does nothing to solve the problem, community reacts with backlash against kid and mother? What in hell?
