The Lawrence school board’s policy advisory committee has decided not to recommend an outright ban of the Confederate flag. Instead, committee members plan to draft a policy recommendation that broadens the school district’s definition of discrimination and harassment to include symbols that convey hate messages.

In addition to protecting the district from being sued by students claiming a violation of their freedom of speech, committee members say that a less specific policy will protect students from multiple forms of discrimination.

“I think that’s inclusive without excluding potentially other kinds of hate speech that we may not be able to anticipate yet,” school board President Vanessa Sanburn told her fellow committee members at their meeting Tuesday.

Currently, the district’s discrimination and harassment policy protects against physical, verbal and written discrimination and harassment. Sanburn is on the policy advisory committee along with board member Shannon Kimball and Dave Cunningham, director of human resources and legal services for the district.

The committee is also considering drafting a recommendation that would expand the discrimination and harassment policy to include the concept of micro-aggressions. Micro-aggressions are often defined as comments or actions that represent hateful, derogatory or stereotypical beliefs about a minority group. The committee discussed the potential of expanding the district’s harassment definition to include micro-aggressions as behavior that eventually falls under the legal definition of harassment.

“Because the idea is that those things over time, in sum, then become something sufficiently severe, pervasive or persistent as to fit in (with the definition of harassment),” Kimball said.

The committee began considering policy changes after a student petition gathered hundreds of signatures in support of a district policy banning the Confederate flag. The petition was submitted to the board in March after a Free State student flew a full-sized Confederate flag from his pickup truck that he parked on school grounds. After about a week, the student was told by school administration that he could no longer bring the flag to school because it was disrupting the learning environment.

Since the committee began considering a ban of the flag, much of the discussion has centered on existing case law on the subject. Particular attention was paid to a case, West v. Derby Unified School District, from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes Kansas. In that case, the court upheld the Derby school district’s ban of the Confederate flag, in part because of the presence of widespread racial tension, including physical and verbal altercations between students.

Even though there were incidents in Lawrence two years ago after a racial epithet was written on school property, the committee didn’t think those necessarily met the court’s definition of an “environment of pervasive racial tension.”

“To me that seems to potentially warrant or meet that requirement,” Sanburn said after Tuesday’s meeting. “But again, it seems as though in the case that we have to review that we have a ruling on, which is the one in Derby, there was more severe unrest.”

As far as the potential of including micro-aggressions in the district’s harassment policy, Sanburn said that exactly how the term will be defined isn’t yet certain. Micro-aggressions were one of the concerns brought up by the students who wrote and circulated the petition to ban the flag. Sanburn said the committee will review how other harassment policies that address micro-aggressions define them.

“According to students, there can be things that happen, comments that are made that on their own merit — like looked at by themselves in isolation — don’t seem that disturbing or difficult, but when put together over the course of a student’s semester or school year or educational experience, could meet that definition of pervasive and persistent,” Sanburn said. “And so we are wondering if that’s been handled in any other districts or in any other workplaces in a way that we could craft definitions and/or protections for students to include that.”

At its next meeting, the committee plans to finish drafting the recommended changes to the district’s discrimination and harassment policy. Any recommendations will be discussed and eventually voted on by the school board.

The committee’s next meeting is 1:30 p.m. May 16 at the school district offices, 110 McDonald Drive.