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A Cumberland County school teacher is defending her comments to a fifth-grade pupil who expressed support for John McCain in her class last spring.

The exchange at Mary McArthur Elementary School was captured by a Swedish television documentary crew, and the video is making the rounds on the Internet including YouTube.

In the video, which reportedly aired in Scandinavia earlier this week, teacher Diatha D. Harris calls the Iraq War “senseless” and tells one student whose father is a soldier that McCain would keep troops there for 100 years.

The classroom discussion begins with Harris asking the class who they support for president. When two students say McCain, she responds with “Oh Lord” and “Oh Jesus.”

She asks them why they are you pulling for McCain or Obama. One student says she supports Obama because “he is making good changes” like “not having a fight between Iraq, and having soldiers killed.”

“So in other words,” Harris says, “Barack is going to end that war in Iraq.”

One girls says she supports McCain. When asked why, she tells her teacher “I think it’s because of my parents are going for him, too.’’

Harris points out that the girl’s father is in the military, then says to the class that Iraq is a “senseless war.”

“And by the way,” Harris tells the girl, “the person that you’re picking for president said that our troops could stay in Iraq for another hundred years if they need to. So that means that your daddy could stay in the military for another hundred years.”

The girl appears to be embarrassed and doesn’t respond.

Harris said three children in the class had parents in the military.

In an interview late Thursday, Harris, 53, said somebody edited the video to make it appear she was an Obama partisan imposing her views on a child. In fact, Harris said, she made gestures after pupils voiced support for Obama.

“It has been doctored,” Harris said. “They didn’t show anything about Obama.”

In another sequence on the video, however, Harris sports an Obama button during a pep rally at the school.

Wanda McPhaul, a spokeswoman for Cumberland schools, said county officials were shocked when they were alerted to the video.

But McPhaul said Superintendent Bill Harrison, who will post his own videotaped statement on the matter on YouTube later today, is prohibited by state law from revealing what might happen to Harris.

Earlier this week, reports about the video on the Internet said Harris was a teacher in Asheville. She used to be a teacher in western North Carolina, but moved to Fayetteville within the past couple years.

Staff writer Francis X. Gilpin can be reached at gilpinf@fayobserver.com or 323-4848, ext. 372

I agree that it is bad. I think the teacher did as well as she knew to do. But the line about McCain keeping the girl’s Daddy in Iraq for 100 years was not only ignorant/wrong, but also cruel.

I think this is a fairly good argument for teaching the 3 R’s and staying away from “Current Events”.

Why is this teacher not on suspension? Even when my 8th grader went to her Social Studies teacher after class to speak about politics, the teacher politely told her it was not ok for the teachers to discuss it with the children.

Why did other teachers or administrators in the bldg not tell someone she was wearing an Obama pin in the classroom?

Guys, the teacher was wrong. She has apologized to the child and the parents, and they support her. This was a 3 minute clip of a 7 hour day in that class, so none of us have the full picture here. There are issues with our education system, let’s talk about that, but let us not turn this into a witch-hunt. It is beneath us. We Conservatives have 4-8 years to go back and regroup. And we need to.

This is typical. It happens to my children everyday. Democrats are intolerant of Republican views, and black children learn from their parents to be racist against whites. My white/hispanic daughter comes home crying because her black friend calls her racist because we voted for McCain. I don’t understand why racism is allowed when it’s against whites.?

Wow, she had a political debate with children. Kids are too young to be asked who they support for President. It’s wildly inappropriate. And to browbeat a child for something they know nothing about is the height of bullying. There are reasons why kids are not allowed to vote.

This sort of thing is just disgusting to me. My mother is a teacher and if she expressed her religious beliefs (Protestant Christian) or political ones (conservative republican) to high school students who asked her about them she’d get in trouble.

Here we have a woman bullying young elementary school children who have different political beliefs from her. How does someone with sort of radical mindset (not her politics, but her use of her position as teacher to impose them) become a teacher?

she’s not a very good cheerleader either…

The worse have gone into education while picking up a major in college. I could never have a small conservation with some of the teachers I’ve encountered at a coffeeshop. They’re either ignorant or worse culturally inferior. All the white parents should take their kids out that school. As for the teacher, can she pass a written test–if given an article to read, would she be able to develop an essay? The answer is simple. What a shame. North Carolina is down the drain.