Shawna Larson recently told Alpha News that when she arrived to pick up her third grader from Hidden Valley Elementary in Savage on Monday, April 29, a teacher and the principal accompanied her daughter on the walk to her vehicle.
They told Larson that four other students in her daughter's grade had attacked her child on the playground. They made it clear that her little girl did nothing to provoke it, "that it had been a calculated incident and that they were still investigating what had happened."
"I ended up learning within the next couple of days that this was due to her race and her religion, because she wasn't Muslim," Larson detailed. "That was pretty jarring to hear."
When he dropped her off the next morning, the little girl's stepdad noticed she had a black eye, which he photographed for documentation.
"When she came home that day, I just kind of looked her over, and she had bruises on her arms and a bruise on her back, bruises all over her legs," Larson accounts. "She originally told me that they pulled her hair, pulled her down by her hair and started punching her and kicking her. She tried to get up, and they had told her that if she hit them or if she touched them, that they would hurt themselves and tell the teacher that she had hurt them. She just told me, 'All's I could do was lay there, Mom.'"
She said these girls had been friends with her daughter all year long up until this beating, and afterward, her child was moved to a different class because she did not feel safe.
Larson said she understands the school has rules to follow, but because this was "race and religion-fueled," she is alarmed by the fact that these students were never expelled or suspended from school or moved to distance learning.
She also noted that if this had been Christians attacking a Muslim, then it would be a national headline.
