Last Updated on January 17, 2020
Kelly Holstine, recent Minnesota Teacher of the Year, kneeled during the national anthem at the 2020 college football national championship game at the New Orleans Superdome, where President Donald Trump was in attendance.
Holstine, who reportedly serves as director of the OutFront Minnesota advocacy group after her celebrated tenure teaching at an alternative school, tweeted “#imwithkap” “BlackLivesMatter” and “LGBTQ” in reference to her anthem snub at the game, where she was part of a group of teachers being honored. Colin Kaepernick, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, kicked off the progressive trend of taking a knee for the national anthem, which has been celebrated by sectors of the mainstream media and Hollywood.
Holstine previously said on “Democracy Now!” that she skipped a White House teacher ceremony because she refuses to support Trump administration “people who hate my kids.”
“For me, I work at a school that is extremely diverse. It’s an alternative high school…and the policies and the words and the actions of this administration show a great deal of discrimination and prejudice and hatred toward the students that I serve. And I could not in good conscience even implicitly support people who hate my kids,” Holstine said. “Also as a gender non-conforming lesbian, there have been, if you look on the GLAAD website, to date there’s 104 attacks on my community, against my LGBT community and I want to model for my students that even though you can respect someone’s position you also can have healthy boundaries and decide what’s right for you. I don’t generally go into other people’s homes if I know that they hate me for who I am without ever actually knowing anything about me…”
Holstine said the Trump administration “treats my kids very, very poorly.”
Asked to elaborate, Holstine was vague on specifics about how Trump and his administration hate her students, but mentioned a hijab-wearing Muslim student who allegedly faces verbal calls for her to return home to Somalia when she is in public, and Holstine blames the Trump administration for supposedly making people more vocal in their hatred of others.
