Instead of encouraging students to have a good attitude toward police officers, this school seems to be doing the opposite. This dad was outraged after what he saw hanging on the wall in his daughter’s English honors class.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — A parent of a North Oldham High School student is again raising concern over a piece of art that is hanging in his daughter’s classroom.
The artwork depicts two scenes: A flashback to 1930 with a member of the Ku Klux Klan wearing a white hood and pointing a gun at an black man with the Confederate flag below it; the other side of the picture says 2015 and features a police officer pointing a gun at an African American child with the American flag below it.
…
Oldham County Schools spokeswoman Tracy Green told WDRB on Wednesday morning that the student work on display that has been called into question is in response to an assignment about racial injustice and is a piece by a student from a previous year’s class.
“When discussing social injustice, people will likely be offended by some topic,” Green said. “The drawing is a student’s artistic representation based on the lens through which the student viewed that issue and the student has a First Amendment right to share that opinion.”
Read more: WDRB
Here was his viral Facebook post about the ‘art’ in his daughter’s classroom:
This was hanging in my daughter’s Honors English Class at:
North Oldham High School, 1815 South HWY 1793, Goshen, KY 40026
1-502-228-0158
I sent out a request to take it down and it seems that the school and school administrators believe this to be an appropriate form of discourse and educationally noteworthy. The teacher stated, “it’s a really good example and shows how racial violence has evolved”. My daughter was subjected to this yet again, and my requests to the school to abstain from this obvious hostile learning environment were met with deaf ears.
I now ask that each of you who care, share this with every first responder you know. I cannot sit back and allow the teacher’s supposed right to free speech when the courts have found that the right to freedom of speech is not absolute if it compromises a student’s right to learn in a hostile-free environment. For example, the courts have held that professor’s use of vulgar language is “not germane to the subject matter.” The courts have held that instructors must avoid indoctrinating or proselytizing.
This Honors English class read the Pulitzer Prize Winning book, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee, and were supposed to do art, based on the book. The book is a beautiful piece of art describing social and familial dilemmas of the early 1900s, and has NOTHING to do with the hatred filled propaganda coming from some in this country today. The “art” is not from a student in the class, it was from a student last year and the teacher liked it so much she placed it back on the wall.
My daughter is not unlike other children of first responders. She fears for my safety every day, and believes me to be a man of honesty and courage. She is proud to say I am her father and tells others what I do for a living. What this propaganda creates, are future cop haters, which endanger me, and 800,000 other courageous protectors. We speak of tolerance, we speak of changing hostile environments, we speak of prejudice, and we speak of racial relations, yet, when it comes to hostility toward police, their families, and profiling them through bigotry we are expected to tolerate it. I will not, nor will my child.
I ask again, will you join me? Please spread the word and show the school what it means to be educators.
Thank you,
Dave Hamblin
