When Durango School District 9-R administrators directed teachers at several schools on Oct. 9 to remove “political flags, posters and items displaying political symbols,” specifically the Black Lives Matter flag and an iteration of the LGBTQ+ pride flag, the community reacted with fervor.
Students staged a walkout and around 100 people flooded the Board of Education meeting on Tuesday. After an hour of public comment, board members voted unanimously to suspend the directive pending exploration of other ways to resolve a parent’s complaint that prompted the directive.
“I would not have been able to anticipate the way that the response went,” 9-R Chief Academic Officer Dylan Connell said in an interview with The Durango Herald a day after the school board’s vote.
The directive allowed standard pride flags to stay in classrooms, but instructed teachers to remove an iteration known as the “progress pride flag,” which contains a chevron of stripes representing the intersex and transgender communities, as well as people of color
The district tried to avoid offering a cold and technically cumbersome explanation for the directive, which was predicated upon narrowly tailored legal advice.
Instead, in an Oct. 14 letter to the community, Superintendent Karen Cheser tried to highlight the decision in the context of the district’s “unwavering commitment to valuing diversity and supporting equity, inclusiveness and a sense of belonging.”
But the message Cheser wanted to send to students – “We love you. We value you” – was not, by and large, the one many in the community heard.
“Shame on me for not realizing that by taking something down that had been there, and maybe not having that conversation about replacing (the flags) or (saying) ‘Let’s work on this,’ that it sent the message that we didn’t care,” Cheser said in an interview this week with the Herald. “That was not, at all, the message.”
In the month leading up to the Oct. 1 directive, district administrators had been in extensive communication with an aggrieved parent and school district attorneys, according to documents released through a Colorado Open Records Act request.
The parent’s name and other personally identifying information was redacted.
In a comment before the school board Tuesday night, Durango resident Bailey Carlson expressed confusion about the specificity of the directive.
“I find it absolutely astounding that a classroom could have a rainbow flag, intersex flag, transgender flag and even a black- and brown-striped flag next to each other, but once you put them together, somehow that is deemed too political,” said Carlson, who is transgender.
But Carlson may have tapped into the technical nature of the legal question at hand.
The issue over political expression in the classroom began in late August, with emails from the parent of a sixth grader to the child’s teacher and principle.
LBTQ+ symbols in the classroom, which had been produced by students as part of an instructional unit, prompted the conversation. The parent’s letter also brought up an unspecified introduction in the classroom of a speech by Vice President Kamala Harris.
The principal explained in an email to the parent that the LGBTQ+ symbols aligned with the district’s commitment to inclusivity and that the speech by Vice President Harris was “aligned to civic and history standards relating to her as the first female and first person of color to hold this office.”
“Wow, this is complete and utter grooming and indoctrination,” the parent responded. “… Reading, writing and arithmetic, real science and real history should be taught not a woke agenda!”
The parent also complained that an employee had asked their child to remove a bracelet promoting Donald Trump. Chief Academic Officer Dylan Connell said the school principal investigated the allegation that day, found it was substantiated and made sure the employee knew they were not permitted to limit a student’s political expression.
The matter escalated through the district’s chain of command, culminating in a determination that the content that prompted the complaint had been created by past students and remained on display was a form of political speech by the teacher.
On Sept. 11, the parent filed a formal complaint broadly alleging that the materials were political and were indoctrinating students.
Darryl Farrington, 9-R’s attorney, explained in an Oct. 15 email to Cheser that teachers should not be permitted to express political statements because the district would have to allow all political expression, which could “compromise instruction and learning.
“We, through consultation with our legal counsel, perceived that we were not in a legally defensible learning environment,” Connell said.
Farrington directed the district to apply two criteria to determine what was political. First, he said to discern the original intent of the symbol’s creator; second, determine the primary use of the symbol.
Although some might display the traditional rainbow flag with political intent, he wrote, the flag’s use is primarily consistent with its original purpose, which was to express that being a member of the LGBTQ+ community is something to take pride in.
The original stated intent of the progress pride flag’s creator was that “progress is not complete, and further work remains to be done,” Farrington wrote.
Similarly, the Black Lives Matter flag is an explicitly political rallying cry as established in case law, Farrington wrote.
While the district has tried to highlight its many coalitions and committees dedicated to promoting inclusivity, the confusion swirling around the directive to remove political flags clouded that message.
In response to a directive to remove just two specific flags under the umbrella of political expression, many in the community heard a far broader message.
Cheser wished she had told teachers “I want you to, like, magnify the rainbow flags and the safe space flags and all those others.” She didn’t see the reaction coming.
“That wasn’t very perceptive of me,” she said. “… (I thought) that teachers might understand, at this point, our legal dilemma but at the same time be able to tell kids ‘Hey, we can still do rainbow flags. We’re doing safe space flags. We can work toward getting this other flag back, but in the meantime you should know that you’re valued, loved (and) welcomed.’” Cheser said.
As 9-R spokeswoman Karla Sluis noted previously, school districts are at the front line of culture wars right now. And that front made it to Durango on Tuesday night.
“It was 10 of us, to over a hundred of them,” La Plata County Republican Central Committee Chairman Dave Peters wrote in an email to the party Thursday night.
Peters did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
McKenzie, the mother of two students in a 9-R middle and elementary school, was one of two people who spoke in favor of the directive at Tuesday’s meeting. In an interview with The Durango Herald conducted on the condition that McKenzie be identified by her first name only because she fears community retaliation, she said the inclusivity efforts have moved beyond neutrality.
“My whole stance is I just want neutrality,” McKenzie said. “I want everybody to feel included.”
But to her, the inclusive message of a progress pride flag comes at the inherent price of exclusivity toward others.
“When you bring recognition to just one group of people, then you are, by omission … not showing the same or equal support of other groups or other people,” she said.
McKenzie said her son was bullied because he responded with confusion after he was asked to introduce himself with his gender pronouns. She didn’t feel as if that was inclusive of her son. And if asking students not to introduce themselves with pronouns makes transgender students feel uncomfortable?
“Tough (expletive),” she said.
As employees who report to the school board, Cheser and Connell said they are not permitted to put the district in legal jeopardy.
But the board may take risks at the advice of counsel as members see fit.
And that is exactly what one parent on Tuesday called on the board to do.
Doug Reynolds, a parent and Durango attorney said he could not fault a party for taking the easy route to avoid litigation.
However, he pointed to a recent court case in Denver, in which a parent of a student at the Slavens School demanded that “straight pride” flags be flown alongside LGBTQ+ pride flags. Denver Public Schools rejected the request, and a federal judge found that flying the LGBTQ+ pride flag aligned with specific policies and the district’s equity-based curriculum.
Rather than open up the classroom as a forum to all political speech – precisely what 9-R officials hoped to avoid – the school board could adopt specific polices that endorse support for the LGBTQ+ community. Such policies have been considered speech of the government itself, and the government is not obligated to offer equal airtime for all views, the U.S. Supreme Court held in 2022.
“I’m calling on 9-R to now show some backbone, just like Denver and the Slavens School did,” Reynolds told the board.
Ultimately, that will be a decision of the school board – and not necessarily an easy one, Cheser said.
“We’re in such a complex area until more case law happens that will support the nuances of this,” she said. “It really is just a risk.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
