Change has come n but at a price to some.
An O’Fallon, Missouri man said he was fired for insubordination after refusing to remove his Barack Obama hat while driving a school bus in the Fort Zumwalt School District in St. Charles.
Odell Stukes, 66, said his supervisor told him that a parent had complained about his Obama cap and that it violated school district policy. Stukes refused to remove his cap. He was suspended with pay when he stood on his refusal, then suspended without pay and finally fired.
Stukes asked for the district policy, but didn’t see anything to back up the order from his supervisor. What Stukes saw was a policy against campaigning.
“I wasn’t campaigning n I drive 5- to 13-year-olds and they can’t vote, and the policy didn’t say anything about wearing hats, pins or shirts,” Stukes said.
Patty Corum, deputy superintendent of the district, said the district interprets and enforces the policy and that its tax-paid employees shouldn’t be influencing children with their personal opinions.
“We can’t show one side and not the other,” Corum said. “We had a person remove a McCain button.”
Tony Rothert, legal director of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, said the district’s policy is just as unclear as the statute that forbid electioneering near a poll on election day.
“The statute prohibits campaigning, but we don’t believe it should have included the passive wearing of clothing by voters,” Rothert said.
Stukes said he plans to file suit against the district.
More Obama drama
Erica “Natural” Bennett said she got a call the day after the election from her alarm company alerting her that her alarm sounded at about 1:37 a.m.
She thought about the large, hand-painted Obama logo on one of the windows at her Natural Uhuru salon in South St. Louis.
She was right. There was a hole in the bottom half of the window, which was shattered entirely.
“When I saw the logo of ‘Change’ shattered, I wiped my tears and said to myself, ‘This will not break me, but only make me stronger so that I may do my part in helping President-elect Obama continue to bring change to myself, my community and the world,” Bennett said.
Bennett said as an entrepreneur she was glad to be able to display an Obama sign without fear of blacklash that some workers feared.
She said, “I spoke with friends in other cities and n whether they were in corporate America, offices, restaurants, factories or schools n they said it was quiet, somber and tense between blacks and whites.”