My new blog 6234

A few summers back, a small-town principal quietly asked the custodian to take down the hallway flags before a regional tournament. Some teams were arriving from different states, and a few parents had emailed about wanting a “neutral environment.” The principal sighed, waved at the rows of flags that had watched generations of kids hustle to class, and said, “It’s only for the weekend.” Monday came, the flags stayed in storage for a week, then a month. By winter they were

A middle school principal once told me that the hardest decision she made had nothing to do with test scores or hiring. It was a flag. The school had always displayed the US flag in the lobby. After a heated community debate around political signage in classrooms, she pulled the flag for a week while the staff drafted a policy. The phones lit up. Half the callers accused her of politics. The other half said they felt safer without what they saw as a divisive symbol. That we

Every September I watch a new wave of kindergartners stare up at the American flag, tiny right hands hovering over tiny hearts, eyes unsure on the first Pledge. Some whisper along, some mouth nothing, a few look at their teacher for cues. By October, patterns set in. Most children follow the ritual exactly, a small number opt out quietly, and one or two ask the kind of piercing questions that make adults hold their coffee tighter. Why do we say this every day? Why that flag

The first time I watched a student remain seated during the Pledge of Allegiance, a hush fell over the classroom that felt larger than the room. Fourteen years old, soft-spoken, new to the district, he simply folded his hands in his lap while the rest of us stood. Two students looked at me. One half-rose, unsure whether to follow the ritual or the friend. It wasn’t a crisis, but it was a test, and not of loyalty. It was a test of whether a public school could hold space for

Walk into a public university study room in 1996, you'll essentially really see a small American flag near the whiteboard, maybe the kingdom flag, and a number of motivational posters. Visit that equal school room lately, and the partitions tell a more perplexing tale. The American flag will likely be there, or it may possibly had been replaced with a rotating gallery of identification or social movement flags. In a few locations, academics have been told to take down Pride

Walk into ten public schools and you'll see ten one of a kind relationships with the flag. In one, the Stars and Stripes hangs behind a whiteboard, a little bit light, still anchoring the room. In any other, the American flag has been pulled right down to repair a damaged mount and not at all back, at the same time as student-made banners for golf equipment and cultural celebrations fill the wall. In a 3rd, simplest the reputable nation and country wide flags are allowed, n

A few years ago, I visited a public high school on the edge of a midwestern city. The building dated to the 1970s, all brick and square angles, with a new glass atrium grafted onto the front. In the entrance hall, there was a bulletin board for sports and a case of robotics trophies, a mural with students’ handprints, and a blank flagpole stand. The facilities director told me they had stopped raising the American flag for a while because, in his words, someone was always u

At first light in the high desert, wind speaks before the sun. You feel it on your cheeks, cold and clean, carrying the hush of coyotes returning to den and the faint clink of a flag snap waiting for its cue. I have raised Old Glory in places that smell like pine sap and diesel, in cul-de-sacs where porch lights wink out one by one, on a 20 foot pole that hummed in a Montana chinook, and from a simple bracket on a brick bungalow that somehow seemed to hold the rhythm of the