Elementary School Rewards North Carolina Boy With Confederate Hat

A North Carolina woman is furious her son’s school gave him a hat that she deemed a reminder of “a dark time in our history.”

According to NY Daily News reports:

A North Carolina mother is reeling after an elementary school rewarded her black son with a Confederate Army hat.

When Natasha Lea’s 9-year-old son Jacob got off his Reidsville school bus last week, she said she was absolutely floored by what she saw him wearing on his head.

“I said, let me see that hat,” Lea emotionally recalled to MyFox8.

Jacob obediently handed her the grey flat-topped cap, which didn’t have any outside markings on it. But when she looked inside, she saw the damning proof.

Its tag read “Confederate.”

“I did not want to believe that. That a school actually let him walk around as an African American child with a Confederate cap on,” she said.

Rockingham County Spokesperson Karen Hyler confessed that the hat was given away to Lea’s son as part of a class prize in exchange for “big bucks,” a kind of academic currency rewarded to their students.

But the gift wasn’t given in a “malicious way” by his teacher, she said.

“Before winter break in December, the class had an auction where students could bid on different items using their ‘big bucks,'” she told MyFox8.

The cap, one of several items donations by families to be used as prizes, was consequently given to Jacob.

Hyler said he lost the hat just after winning it, but found it last week in lost-and-found.

Lea’s outrage left her in tears.

“This stands for a dark time in our history,” she told the station while pointing at the hat.

The school said they would do a better job of screening items donated to the school, “to err on the side of caution that they could not be seen as potentially offensive.”

We’re with mom on this one. What were they thinking at that school??? SMH.

WGHP