Officials at a Pennsylvania school district asked a middle school teacher to take down a rainbow flag — a symbol of support for the LGBTQ community — from a classroom wall.
The Morning Call of Allentown reported the teacher agreed to remove the flag after “an extremely cordial and productive conversation,” Dallas School District Superintendent Thomas Duffy said.
Duffy said someone had contacted officials at the Luzerne County district earlier this month, objecting to the flag.
Upon asking for a legal opinion from district solicitor Vito DeLuca, Duffy said, “His legal advice was that generally the flag had a connection to political underpinnings and he recommended it be removed.”
The issue of whether a rainbow flag should be displayed in a public school is “a little bit of uncharted territory,” he said.
The legal opinion led to “an open conversation” with the teacher and others in the district, Duffy told the Morning Call.
“Both the teacher and the administration understood where we were coming from,” he said. “We also talked about the importance of making sure that all students feel safe in all classrooms.”
The decision to remove the flag “does not reflect the feelings of the district as it relates to what the flag represents,” Duffy said. “It’s more of an issue of what can be posted on a classroom wall.”
District employees and officials are determined to provide “an increasingly accepting and kind culture within our schools,” he said.
A rainbow flag was also removed from a second classroom, Duffy said.
He did not release the names of the teachers who removed the flags or confirm which grade or grades they taught. Dallas Middle School includes grades 6-8.
On social media, posts to a private Facebook group called Back Mountain Diversity on Sunday stated that the issue involved a seventh-grade teacher.
The Morning Call reported that attempts to obtain comments from members of that group were unsuccessful.
Additionally, no phone number could be located for Mary Beth Zardus, president of the Dallas Education Association, the union which represents the district’s teachers.
Michael Cherinka, a Dallas High School teacher and former union president, said he had not heard of the rainbow flag controversy prior to Sunday.
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