A Thousand Voices: Respondents mostly support banning the Confederate flag from school grounds

Free State High School

Opinions were mixed in our latest LJWorld.com survey about whether the Lawrence school district should ban Confederate flags on school grounds — an issue brought to light in late January, when a Free State High School student was told to remove the flag from his truck.

Many of those surveyed agreed with that decision, as well as with a movement by some Free State students to have the district implement an outright ban. But there’s still some dissent, and others who hadn’t yet formed an opinion on whether the image needs to be prohibited.

About this article

A Thousand Voices is a feature that surveys readers of LJWorld.com about their opinions on a variety of issues being debated by the public. The Journal-World will regularly conduct a poll that captures a representative sample of the approximately 35,000 users of LJWorld.com. All polling will be conducted by our partner, Google Consumer Surveys. The Google system chooses participants for the poll at random. Users of LJWorld.com have no ability to choose to take the poll. Some people had this survey presented to them when they went to our website and some didn’t. Each poll consists of at least 1,000 responses from website users. The survey software calculates results using margins of error and 95 percent confidence levels common to the polling industry.

If you have a topic you would like to see as part of a future poll, please suggest it to Nikki Wentling at nwentling@ljworld.com.

Answers to each question were nearly identical. Here’s a look at the results:

• When asked about the Free State High School administration’s decision to disallow the one student from bringing the Confederate flag onto school grounds, 55 percent of respondents answered that they supported the decision. Others said they were not sure (23.8 percent), and 21.1 percent said they did not support it. The results had a margin of error of 2.5 to 3.2 percentage points.

• To the next question, about whether the Lawrence school district should create a policy banning the Confederate flag, 55.1 percent said they would support the policy and 21.1 percent said they would not. The remaining 23.8 percent answered that they were not sure. The results had a margin of error of 2.4 to 3.1 percentage points.

Before answering the survey questions, readers were asked whether they were registered voters in Lawrence. They were shown the remaining questions only if they answered yes.

The debate about banning the Confederate flag came to a head last year after a white man, later shown in photos posing with a Confederate flag, shot and killed nine people at a historically black church in Charleston, S.C.

Following the shooting, the flag was removed from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds. Other states and companies followed suit, with efforts to remove the image from license plates and out of stores.

The Free State parking lot became a site of the debate the last month, when school administration disallowed a student from flying the flag from a pole on his truck while on school grounds.

Some Free State students are now circulating a petition to create a districtwide ban on the Confederate flag, instead of making future decisions about its display on a case-by-case basis. The petition states that allowing the flag to be flown violates the school’s discrimination and harassment policy.

A change to policy would have to be voted on by the Lawrence school board. Students have said they are planning to present the petition at a school board meeting in late February or early March.