DENVER — A new lawsuit challenges the inclusivity policies of Denver Public Schools (DPS).
A parent of two students wants at least $3 million dollars, because his kids' K-thru-8 school has refused to add a flag next to the rainbow pride flags.
Slavens School, a K-8 school in DPS, has small rainbow flags outside of classroom entrances.
According to a federal lawsuit filed this month, Nathan Feldman has tried for more than a year to get the school to add another flag on display.
The flag he wants put up is known as a “heterosexual pride” flag.
The lawsuit claims that Feldman’s third graders' constitutional rights are being deprived because the school has refused the requests for the additional flag.
Read the full lawsuit below:
“Yeah, it makes me angry,” parent Rebecca Lunceford said.
Lunceford has a first and second grader at Slavens. She found out about the lawsuit on Wednesday night.
“The majority of the adults that are represented at our school are white, heterosexual adults. I am a mother of two minority children, so I do have a lens that looks at our school through that version of equity and inclusion,” Lunceford said.
The lawsuit was filed by a Washington, D.C. firm with a website that boasts lawsuits against President Biden, every secretary in the Biden administration, as well as a focus on Freedom of Religion and COVID-19 vaccine mandate lawsuits.
“It takes a lot of resources to fight a lawsuit, and so these resources could be better spent creating real equity programs at the school,” Lunceford said. “If we’re really looking for equity and inclusion in our educational programs, there are better ways to create it than baseless lawsuits that distract from our teachers and our educators from doing their job.”
Based on the lawsuit, Feldman has been trying for more than a year to get the “straight pride” flag put on display.
In an email from Nov. 22, 2022, he wrote:
“I would like DPS permission to follow DEI to display a straight pride flag with 2 gender symbols on it in front of my children's 2nd grade classrooms at Slavens DPS.”
DEI stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
He filed the lawsuit after repeated attempts to get the flag put on display after his children entered the third grade.
“There isn’t anything particularly about the pride flag that excludes or causes disparate treatment of people who don’t consider themselves part of the queer community,” Megan Bishop, a constitutional law attorney, said. “They’re already included. They’re not being marginalized by not having a ‘straight pride’ flag up there.”
Bishop pointed out that a public school is government funded and likely protected in this decision.
“Here, what the plaintiffs are trying to do is force a recognized government entity to engage in speech, when actually, the reality of the situation is. when it is a government entity, they’re allowed to pick the messages they want to convey as a public message,” Bishop said.
In 2020, the DPS School Board passed a resolution on “Inclusion for Our LGBTQIA+ Employees, Students and Community Members.”
Part of that resolution stated:
“…the District supports the right of its employees to post in their classrooms, offices, or halls a rainbow flag or other sign of support for LGBTQIA+ students or staff, because these are symbols consistent with the District’s equity-based curriculum…”
“The ‘straight pride’ movement, generally, was created like a counteroffensive to the LGBT movement, which then can cause those students who do identify as non-binary or queer to be distracted in their schoolwork,” Bishop said.
She said that the legal challenge would be different in the school were preventing the students from having a flag displayed on their backpacks, for example.
“The government entity, or the school, cannot regulate or prohibit the free speech of citizens of their private students, except there are exceptions as there usually are in the law,” Bishop said.
She said that those exceptions include something that would incite violence or disrupt the education of other students, meaning something so uncomfortable that a student cannot focus in class or felt in danger.
Since the rainbow pride flags are in support of a school district resolution, Bishop said the school is likely protected, and that the plaintiffs will not succeed.
“I don’t think that they’ll prevail. I think that they are conflating the difference between private speech and public speech, and that’s ultimately what it’s going to come down to,” Bishop said.
“I think that would be sad if this was used to remove inclusion from DPS,” Lunceford said. “If the point is to be inclusionary of all people, no matter how you show up, there’s ways that we can all work together to get to that final endpoint without adding layers of visual iconography that stand for exclusion, or for a single group, because that goes against everything that we’re all trying to do.”
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