If there’s one thing that’s synonymous with birthdays, it’s having a birthday cake. According to Kimberly Alford, however, a photo of her 15-year-old daughter, Kayla, sitting with her colorful birthday cake while wearing a sweater with a rainbow on it led to her being expelled from Whitefield Academy, a private Christian school in Louisville, Kentucky, as reported by the Washington Post.
How did a seemingly innocent birthday celebration at a Texas Roadhouse lead to this teenager being kicked out of school? Alford says she posted the picture on her Facebook. “She was happy, she looked beautiful,” Alford told Wave 3 News. “You know, of course as a mom, I took her picture of her blowing out her candles and I posted that on my Facebook page.”
Alford acknowledges to the Post that she knows rainbows are often symbols for the LGBTQ community. While the shirt and cake appear to be rainbows, they aren’t explicitly the rainbow Pride flag. Either way, Alford says that her daughter’s shirt and cake were entirely coincidental. Alford told the Post she gave the school her receipt from the cake, which described the cake as having “assorted colors,” not even “rainbow.” Basically: Sometimes a rainbow is just a rainbow.
She believes someone sent the image to the school, which she says resulted in her receiving an email on Jan. 6 from school officials with a picture of her Facebook post attached. The message? According to Alford, the letter notified her that her child was no longer a student, effective immediately.
"When I called the head of the school to discuss it with him, I was quite emotional," Alford explained to ABC News in an interview. "He told me, 'Kim, the sweater, the cake, it just kind of represents gay pride … when you saw the cake you should have refused it.'"
Alford says she filed an appeal and was denied. Alford says that her daughter, who has been a student there since the sixth grade, has had a few disciplinary issues before. What sort of issues? Shaving one side of her head and having an e-cig on campus. And now, apparently, rainbow cake.