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Teacher suspended over video of students’ Obama chants

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A teacher at a Kansas City charter school was suspended Monday after video of his public school students chanting in praise of Barack Obama became a national sensation on YouTube.

In the video, boys from the Urban Community Leadership Academy, wearing T-shirts and camouflage pants, march in formation and shout out how Obama has sparked the middle school students' aspirations to be architects, lawyers and entrepreneurs.

The video was the subject of the most read and most e-mailed story on Fox News' Election Headquarters Web page Monday.

The school's director, Joyce McGautha, said she had been advised by legal counsel to make no more comments about the video while the school investigates.

The video - created in May while Obama and Hillary Clinton were competing for the Democratic nomination, but apparently not posted until recently - brought a wave of complaints on blogs of a public school being much too partisan.

The Urban Community Leadership Academy is a project-based learning school that serves about 300 students in the fifth through ninth grades, mostly high-risk students, McGautha said. Nine out of 10 of its students qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Earlier, McGautha told Fox News that she did not condone the video and did not want it disseminated on the Internet. She acknowledged that public school teachers cannot support particular candidates in the classroom.

The teacher, whose identity was not revealed, will get a hearing before the charter school's board, she told Fox News.

While McGautha could not comment any more on the video, she encouraged anyone who doubts the integrity of the school to visit.

"We invite anyone to come and look around," she said, "and see the type of school we have and sit down and have a conversation with us."

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Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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