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School Tells Student To Remove American Flags, Quickly Realizes Big Mistake

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This school district needed to be taught a lesson.

At a time when most of the mainstream media is obsessed with immature students demanding that the government crack down on Americans’ constitutionally protected rights to protect themselves, it comes as a refreshing surprise when a high school senior takes a stand for his own right to support the country.

But that’s exactly what Tance Crowder did.

According to KARK, the incident took place in Vilonia, Arkansas, when Vilonia High School officials order Crowder on Tuesday to remove two American flags from the pickup truck where Crowder proudly displayed them.

The district cited a 3-year-old policy that prohibits students from flying “controversial” flags, according to KARK.

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But to Crowder, who is planning to enlist in the Marines after graduation, there was nothing controversial about Old Glory at all.

“It stands for everything,” Crowder told the station. “I think it is my right to be able to fly the American flag on my truck in America.”

That might seem like the kind of statement that hardly needs explaining, but apparently it did to some officials in the central Arkansas school district, about 40 miles north of Little Rock.

“A school staff member following protocol, as he understood it, asked the student to put (the flags) in his car,” Superintendent David Stephens told KARK.

Check out the KARK story here:

According to Arkansas Online, the website of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the policy was intended for banners such as the Confederate flag, which drives liberals so berserk.

Do you think more school districts could use a lesson like this one?
Even that is questionable, since students have a First Amendment right to free expression. But for the American flag?

In an era when the American military is fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and facing down rival militaries from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea, prohibiting students from flying the red, white and blue seems more than a little bit unpatriotic.

And equating the American flag with the Confederate battle flag, or any other banner, is simply ignorant.

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Fortunately, the school district saw the error in its ways.

Stephens told Arkansas Online that after Crowder’s challenge to the policy, students will be permitted to fly the American flag and the Arkansas state flag on vehicles in the high school’s parking lot.

In a Twitter post, the district wrote it is “never our intention to prevent demonstrations of respect for our nation’s flag”:

It might not have been the intention, but it certainly came off that way.

Fortunately, a high school senior with plans to become a Marine was around to teach a lesson in patriotism that sounds like it was sorely needed.

And it appears the district has learned it.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American




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