By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

PHILADELPHIA – The controversy surrounding a high school student’s decision to wear a Mitt Romney t-shirt on dress-down day has taken another alarming twist.

Sixteen-year-old Samantha Pawlucy said she was mocked and humiliated by her geometry teacher, Lynette Gaymon, for wearing the shirt to class last Friday. Gaymon likened the pro-Romney shirt to a KKK shirt, Pawlucy said.

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School officials are conducting an investigation into the incident, and Gaymon has been assigned to another class.

But now school officials need to launch another investigation – one that looks into the various threats that have been made against Pawlucy by her fellow students.

According to Philly.com, Pawlucy’s “classmates, former friends, and even students from other schools had issued threats over what they saw as lies and misinterpretation.”

As students left school Thursday afternoon, “several groups shouted their support for Gaymon, calling her a ‘great teacher,’ ‘really fun,’ and ‘nothing like the story,’” the news site adds.

Clearly, students are paying attention to the story, and are blaming Pawlucy for the teacher’s troubles.

The facts don’t support that perspective, but that probably won’t matter to a school full of emotional teenagers.

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By most accounts, Gaymon likes to joke around with her students. Gaymon’s defenders want to pass this controversy off as one teacher’s attempt at humor.

In our view, that’s a very weak defense.

It’s important to remember that this incident occurred on the sixteenth day of school. Gaymon and her students could not possibly have known each other well enough for Gaymon to feel justified in making a joke about the Ku Klux Klan.

Such racially charged “jokes” are almost never appropriate, and certainly not on the sixteenth day of school.

We doubt Gaymon was making a joke.

More importantly, Samantha Pawlucy doubts it, too. That’s why when Gaymon continued her antics two school days after the initial incident, Pawlucy ran out of math class and hid in the bathroom to avoid further embarrassment.

But even if Gaymon intended her remarks to be harmless banter, they have proven to be anything but. This girl’s entire school year has been turned upside down, and she is still losing some friends and enduring threats of violence.

In our view, Gaymon’s joke defense is full of holes. The teacher should be made to publicly apologize to Pawlucy and given some sort of additional punishment.

Her ill-advised behavior has caused this student a great amount of anguish. Gaymon bullied Pawlucy, whether she intended to or not. And that type of behavior shouldn’t be tolerated on any level.