Here’s a surprise.
In Oregon, a small town about a half-hour southwest of Portland has banned “political” flags in its school district’s classrooms.
That includes Black Lives Matter and gay Pride flags.
The Newberg board voted 4-3 for this move.
As Oregon Public Broadcasting noted, the vote also prohibited “any broadly ‘political’ signs, clothing and other items.
The school board will defer to a three-member policy committee to determine how to define “political.”
“This action goes against recent state efforts to highlight support for students, including the Oregon Department of Education’s Black Lives Matter October 2020 resolution and recent efforts to help LGBTQ+ students,” OPB noted.
“Supporters of the flags said they made students feel seen, help students being bullied, while supporters of the board’s vote said the signs were ‘divisive,’ and that signs don’t make people feel safe.”
According to OPB, school board Chairman Dave Brown observed, “As a school board, it’s our job to make decisions that are going to be there for every single kid at Newberg High School, not just the kids that are represented in just one group – it has to be all kids.”
A school counselor, speaking for the 16 counselors across the district, argued that BLM and Pride flags allow students to “see a glimmer of hope that there can still be safe places and safe people in their schools.”
The Oregon School Board Members of Color Caucus wrote a letter to the majority, urging them not to support the ban, because implementing it would be “sending a message of division and marginalization of students and educators who are part of your community.”
Apparently, none of them considered how divisive and marginalizing those symbols are to students who are not part of those groups.
Brian Shannon, the board’s vice chairman, tacked on an amendment so that staff and faulty, while performing their duties, would be prohibited from displaying political “apparel, buttons, placards and all modes of display.”
“The main goal of this is to get political symbols, and divisive symbols out of our schools so we can focus on the already difficult task of educating our students in the core subjects,” Shannon explained, according to OPB.
To Shannon’s point, Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Kate Brown recently, and quietly, enacted a new law that suspends standardized testing in reading, math, and writing as a graduation requirement – in order to benefit, as her spokesman put it, “Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”
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Good. We can keep the American flag and find some commonalities as Americans.