On one hand, I'm pretty sure these kids are snotty malcontents who are doing this just to "make a statement" and to be a pain in the @ss.
On the other hand, I have long said that compulsory recitals of the pledge of allegiance have no place in a free nation. Hell -- for that matter, public schools have no place in a free nation, either.
They weren’t required to recite the pledge, just to stand.
At the age of nine I got tossed out of the Cub Scouts for not learning the Pledge. Had I lived in Hitler's Germany, I probably would have been killed.
When I see our leaders giving away our national wealth to globalists and freedoms to internationalists at the behest of European socialists and to the delight of communists and Islamists, the image of the elite going through the motions as the Pledge to America are utterly phony.