A teenage girl has been left upset after being asked to cover up after wearing pro-Trump clothing at school event celebrating 'American pride'.
Ciretta Mackenzie, a freshman at Epping High School in New Hampshire, had been planning to wear gear depicting the phrase Make America Great Again - a key slogan from Donald Trump's successful 2016 Presidential Election Campaign - but was reportedly told that the shirt and hat violated the school's dress code policy.
Deciding to wear the shirt on 'America pride day', the teenager said she had no idea that her shirt would cause so many problems.
"It’s just a shirt, and it only says Trump make America great again, it doesn’t say anything like build a wall, so I don’t get how it could be offensive, how it could be disrespectful," said the teen.
Ciretta added that, while she took off the hat and borrowed a friend's sweatshirt for the day, she felt that her First Amendment rights were violated, saying that there was nothing stipulating she couldn't wear political clothing to the event at her school.
"If it said no political gear, I could understand why it was dress coded but it didn’t say that, so I feel like I’m obligated to have my own opinion and other people can have theirs. We don’t have to agree, that’s fine."
"Some kids are making [me] feel like I’m uneducated and a bad kid for believing what I want to believe and that’s not right," added Ciretta, while her father said that it was important for politics to be discussed in school.
"We don’t want politics to be totally removed from school, it needs to be in school...the way they went about it was remove everything, you don’t want that," he said, adding that Ciretta's family are planning to meet with the school following the incident, which occurred on Monday this week.
Epping High School also confirmed that two students that day were asked to remove clothing, and have launched an investigation into the incident.
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