NEW BEDFORD, Mass. – A police officer’s daughter asked him, “Daddy, do you shoot people?”

She wondered that after her class participated in a protest outside a school to bring attention to the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri.

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Second graders at Alma Del Mar Charter School participated in the protest and carried signs, including one that read, “Please don’t shoot me, Ferguson.”

“They couldn’t do anything that would be anti-police or anti-any particular people. The scholars agreed to that and they asked the principal for permission as well,” Will Gardner, executive director of the Alma Del Mar Charter School, tells WHDH.

“Having the children off school property without any parental permission slip is inexcusable,” police officer George Borden – and a parent of one of the 7- and 8-year-old protesters – says. “I found that extremely upsetting, multiple people I’ve spoken to felt the same way, I’ve shown them pictures of this.”

The class’s rhetoric hit him personally.

“The first thing she said to me when she got in my car was ‘daddy, do you shoot people?’” the station reports.

Yahoo reports about 20 students took part and chanted things like, “Honk if you want justice.”

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Borden says he found a flyer in his daughter’s backpack advertising another protest “against the unjust systems that allow police officers to kill Black men and boys with impunity.”

“We discourage our teachers from sharing their own political and religious views with their scholars,” Gardner says. “[But] we certainly want our scholars to engage in activities that help them to understand what it means to be citizens and what it means to be a democracy.”

“It wasn’t something the teacher planned,” he says, according to the Boston Globe. “It was something the kids did.”

The paper identifies the teacher as Shabrina Guerrier and says the school alerted parents that she would be discussing “race, diversity, and issues covered by the media.”

“I don’t think 7-year-olds can come up with the idea to go out and protest on the street,” according to Borden.