Free State High School

Lawrence school district leaders considering a ban on the Confederate flag face competing interests: keeping the flag off school grounds and keeping the district out of court.

“You’ve got the power to pass a policy if you want to, but it’s going to subject you to the potential of litigation,” Dave Cunningham, director of human resources and legal services for the district, said at a policy meeting Tuesday.

Cunningham and Lawrence school board members Shannon Kimball and Vanessa Sanburn make up the board’s policy advisory committee. The committee met Tuesday to discuss a student petition that asks the district to ban the flag because it symbolizes racism, white supremacy and violence against people of color.

“I personally find it a horribly offensive symbol, and I think it means everything that these students feel that it means, that’s my personal belief,” said Kimball, who previously worked as an attorney on school issues. “But I don’t think we have a lot of support in the case law to go real far in a policy.”

Three Free State High School students — Abena Peasah, Seamus Ryan and Maame Britwum — attended a school board meeting in March and submitted the student petition, which had hundreds of signatures in support of creating a ban.

At the heart of the debate is the balance between students’ freedom of expression and their right to a school environment free from harassment and discrimination. Though recognizing the importance of such a balance, the students ask how the district can prohibit some forms expression but not others.

“We fail to see how we can have a ban on gang symbols, but not on those of white supremacy,” Peasah told the board when presenting the petition.

Many districts, Lawrence included, prohibit gang-related clothing and symbols because they threaten the safety or well-being of students. The students are arguing that under that same reasoning, the district should also be able to ban the Confederate flag. Cunningham didn’t necessarily disagree.

“Frankly, I think students brought forth a pretty reasonable question: How can you prevent gang apparel and not this flag?” Cunningham said.

The student petition followed an incident in January in which a Free State student flew a full-sized confederate flag from his pickup truck that he parked on school grounds. Some students were upset by the flag, which was displayed from its makeshift flagpole for several days before school administration told the student he could no longer display it.

The reason that the student was not allowed to fly the flag was not because of any school rule or district policy that specifically prohibits the flag, but instead because administrators decided it was disrupting the learning environment.

Instead of creating a specific policy banning the flag, Cunningham suggested that amendments could be made to the district’s current discrimination and harassment policy. The policy currently bans written, verbal or physical discrimination and harassment, and Cunningham said that definition could be expanded to include symbols.

“If you have the means of controlling disruptive behavior through other policies that don’t get you into court, it might be better to utilize those policies and empower your principals to address these issues in that fashion,” he said.

Though wary that banning the flag could lead to litigation, the committee was still not ruling out any possibilities. The committee plans to meet with students at Free State to discuss the topic. Sanburn said she had not made up her mind about the best way to proceed and would like to take the students’ views into account when making a decision.

“I think that hearing from them and discussing it will be helpful,” she said.

The committee will meet with students on April 29 to have an informal discussion about the flag and potential policy changes.