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  • 2018-03-14 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Tennessee School District Ban the American Flag? (en)
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  • In early 2018, a number of far-right Facebook pages and disinformation sites recirculated variations of an outdated and exaggerated claim about a Tennessee school district banning the American flag from campus. The specifics of the claim varied from page to page (some said that students were banned from flying the flag; others claimed that the flag had been banned from campus because it was offensive to certain students), but all iterations included an image of the flag and some version of the question: Do you agree that we should always be able to fly the flag? Three of these four Facebook posts claimed that this Tennessee School District had recently banned the American flag from campus. However, these posts are referring (inaccurately) to an incident that took place more than two years earlier, in August 2015, and the Tennessee school district referenced never banned the American flag to begin with. In 2015, the Dickson County School District temporarily ruled to not allow students to fly flags from their vehicles. At the time, the removal of Confederate flags from public grounds was a hot issue in the media. When at least one student in this district came to school with a Confederate flag on their truck, the school responded by telling students that they were no longer allowed to fly flags from their vehicles across the board: The school district's decision stirred up considerable controversy at the time, as some media outlets reported that the school had banned American flags wholesale. However, as the school district has clarified on numerous occasions, it never banned flags from campuses, and this rule was an informal one relayed to students in an attempt to inform them about how to properly display the American flag. In a long explanation published by the district in the wake of this controversy, officials explained that the American flag could be flown from vehicles if it was properly displayed, since it did not serve as a distraction. Furthermore, students would be allowed to bring flags to campus as long as it was done so respectfully: This controversy is not just inaccurate, but also outdated. (en)
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