Flag flap reminds former teacher of poster complaint
Leckie got support from Chesterton administration
Retired Chesterton High School English teacher Bonney Leckie lives in Florida and works as a real estate agent now, but she’s been fielding texts from former students about how the administration directed three Chesterton
Middle School teachers to remove rainbow flags and other items from their classrooms in recent days.
The situation, which generated a peaceful protest before an April 12 school board meeting that drew around 225 people, was familiar to Leckie, who taught at CHS for 13 years and faced controversy over a poster in her classroom that also dealt with acceptance for the LBGTQ community.
Leckie said throughout the ordeal she had the full support of the administration to keep the poster in her room, which ultimately, according to a professor at the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University in Bloomington, was their purview because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that K-12 teachers have to abide by district decisions for what they can display in their classrooms.
Students and community members have said the rainbow flags at the middle school, which hosts seventh and eighth graders, put students struggling with their sexual identity at ease, made them feel supported and let them know which teachers they could confide in if need be.
In her first year teaching in Chesterton, Leckie put up a poster featuring 10 gay, lesbian and bisexual historic figures, including Michelangelo, Errol Flynn and Walt Whitman. A portion of the text read, “Sexual orientation does not determine a person’s ability to make a mark in the world, let alone history.”
The poster took a spot on her wall for seven years when, in May 1997, a student complained to his mother about it, who called it “propaganda promoting a homosexual lifestyle.”
“The reason I even had that poster was because one of my mentors going through school was gay,” Leckie, 68, said, adding the mentor and her partner were wonderful. Leckie took an early retirement from CHS in 2003.
“I found that poster and I loved it,” she said.
The family complained to the
administration, according to the Post-Tribune’s archives, and officials determined the poster was in line with the school’s educational goals and could remain in the classroom.
The family appealed to the Duneland School Corp. Materials Reconsideration Committee, which voted 9-0 that the poster could remain, with a committee member noting that the poster didn’t convey any sexual overtones or undertones but rather said to “look at people for what they’ve done, not who they are.”
The family appealed to the school board, which voted 5-1 in December of that year to allow the poster to remain.
The student who complained, Leckie said, didn’t say anything to her about the poster before going to the administration and she still wishes he had.
“We could have had an actual conversation, which is what the poster is meant to do,” Leckie said.
The case generated nationwide attention, garnering Leckie a trip to Washington, D.C., on behalf of GLAAD, which advocates for acceptance of the LGBTQ community, and an intellectual freedom award from the Indiana Library Federation.
She credits support from the school community for being able to keep the poster in her room.
“The school board backed me up,” she said. “They could have said no, but they didn’t.”
Without that support, Leckie would have had to take the poster down, per U.S. Supreme Court rulings about K-12 teachers and their classrooms.
“The Supreme Court has taken a very narrow view of the free speech rights and the academic rights of teachers in the classroom,” said Steve Sanders, a Maurer School of Law professor who focuses on constitutional law.
While such rights are protected at the college level, there’s a divide with K-12 teachers, who are considered employees of their school and building principal.
“The principal of the school has final authority over what goes on in the classroom,” Sanders said, adding when it comes to carrying out the curriculum, “the principal and the school corporation have a wide latitude to say what goes in a class.”
The school controls the class, not the teacher, he added, but at the same time a district can’t punish teachers for activity outside of a classroom, such as going to a rally.
In the case of the rainbow flags, the school corporation may fear being perceived as putting out a viewpoint.
While some people see rainbow flags as a sign of support and safety, Sanders said, for others, they are a political and social symbol of how the world should be.
“The basic issue is, fairly or unfairly, teachers have fairly limited freedom under the Constitution,” he said. “They’re seen as mouthpieces of their school district”.
Leckie, a born-again Christian and a “card-carrying Republican,” said she was never faced with the decision to take down the poster or lose her job.
“To me, the pressure is on the weak link, the teacher who doesn’t want to lose a job,” he said. “Had I had to take a stance, I don’t know what I would have done.”
Rainbow flags are more overt in their message, Leckie said, and while she hesitated she added doesn’t see a problem with having them in classrooms.
“It’s just a flag, it’s just colors. You ascribe meaning to it,” she said, adding that’s neither good nor bad. “To me, if anything, it’s a conversation starter.”