Student Gets Suspended For Sitting During Pledge Of Allegiance

Senior India Landry and her family have filed a lawsuit against Cypress Fairbanks ISD school district in Houston.

A Houston student was suspended from school for refusing to stand during the pledge of allegiance.

India Landry, a high school senior at Windfern High School, was kicked out on Monday after refusing to stand for the pledge and wasn’t allowed to return to classes for the majority of the week, KHOU reports.

India says she has been sitting during the pledge for years, but it wasn’t until the National Football League protests began that the school took issue with it.

“I don’t think that the flag is what it says it’s for, for liberty and justice and all that,” India, 17, told KHOU. “It’s not obviously what’s going on in America today.”

India’s mother, Kizzy, said she rushed to the school to pick up her daughter and was told India wouldn’t be allowed back until she stood for the pledge.

The school district’s policy is to have students stand for the pledge unless they have a note from a parent, but Kizzy says her attempts were rejected by Windfern’s principal.

“She can’t come to my school if she won’t stand for the pledge,” Kizzy said the principal told her.

Now, the family is filing a lawsuit against the Cypress Fairbanks ISD school district, the New York Daily News reports. A spokeswoman for the school district told the Daily News she was not aware of the lawsuit and noted a “student will not be removed from campus for refusing to stand for the pledge.”

India, who has been allowed to return to school, told the Daily News that she still intends to sit down.

Similar incidents have occurred in schools across the country since President Donald Trump called professional athletes who kneeled during the anthem “sons of bitches.”

Almost three dozen schools in Louisiana were instructed not to allow student-athletes to kneel during the anthem. A teacher in Farmington Hills, Michigan was put on leave for allegedly assaulting an 11-year-old student who refused to stand for the pledge. Florida schools, at one point since Trump’s comments, were threatening to send home students who didn’t stand for the anthem or pledge home unless they had parental permission.

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