By Khalida Sarwari
Morgan Hill Unified School District’s superintendent today called a Cinco de Mayo incident in which three teenage boys were sent home from Live Oak High School for wearing clothing bearing the American flag ‘extremely unfortunate.’
Superintendent Wesley Smith released a statement saying the district does not prohibit or discourage students from wearing patriotic clothing.
“While campus safety is our primary concern and administrators made decisions yesterday in an attempt to ensure campus safety, students should not, and will not, be disciplined for wearing patriotic clothing,” Smith said.
The case has prompted an outcry as news of the incident has spread across the country. A high school student in Yorktown, Va., created a Facebook page titled “I support the 5 students from Morgan Hill high school.” As of this afternoon, the group had 10 members.
Kathleen Sullivan, a Morgan Hill Unified School District board trustee, said Live Oak experienced problems on Cinco de Mayo last year. She said some students had complained to the principal and vice principal that they had felt intimidated by students waving American flags.
In response to those complaints, school authorities had asked students not to provoke other students by wearing or waving flags this year, Sullivan said.
“The district’s position is that that is not in our policy,” Sullivan said. “But the underlying reason for it was student safety.”
She did not know if the five students had returned to school today, but said they have not been suspended.
Smith said the district is investigating the incident.
Kirk Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said the action taken by the school was warranted if their objective was to maintain the security and safety of the other students.
“Was there a danger of a fight between the students celebrating Cinco de Mayo and the students wearing the American T-shirts? If there was a threat, then their action was ethical,” Hanson said.
“The decisions regarding student dress are always difficult for school authorities and it is possible that any particular dress, including the American flag, could under circumstances be threatening,” Hanson said.
“But when the students’ rights are at stake, the school authorities clearly should try to find some way to protect those rights and at the same time defuse the situation.”