A North Carolina high school teacher says he has been placed on leave after students say he stepped on an American flag as part of a history lesson.
The Fayetteville Observer reports Massey Hill Classical High School teacher Lee Francis said he was informed of his status by the Cumberland County Schools human resources department. Francis said he’s scheduled to meet with system officials on Thursday to discuss the incident stemming from a lesson in his history class.
Francis, who teaches history, asked students for lighters or scissors to destroy an American flag mid-lesson, according to school parent Sara Taylor. When neither of those items were forthcoming, Francis “took the flag and stomped all over it,” Taylor wrote in a Facebook post that has since been deleted or made private.
Taylor, whose child attends the school but was not in the teacher’s classroom, posted a photo of the educator mid-lesson with the American flag crumpled by his feet.
“THIS is part of their curriculum?!?!” she wrote. “With the County getting so much funding for our military kids at this school, I ask the question of mutual respect, nothing less, nothing more. That flag might not mean anything to that teacher, but it means a lot to us and it means a lot to the family’s who had their service member come home to them in a casket with that flagged draped over it.”
Taylor wrote that when she brought her concerns to administrators, the principal said she would “not be allowed to know what happens with this teacher because my student was not in his classroom.” Taylor also said the principal claimed informing the superintendent was unnecessary because the issue was “an in-house issue.”
Cumberland County Superintendent Frank Till Jr. told the Fayetteville Observer that the controversial lesson came to his attention Tuesday morning. “I don’t want to make any comments until I get it sorted all out,” Till told the paper. “There are multiple examples of people doing something like that and being protected.”
But Till allowed that “there are a lot of examples in archives we could use that were appropriate.”
According to the Observer, Francis reportedly defended himself on Facebook by citing the Supreme Court case he was trying to illustrate for his students: Texas v. Johnson (1989), which held 5-4 that flag burning and other forms of desecration were protected by the First Amendment.
Francis also briefly ran for state representative last fall on a progressive platform that included a “revolution” in the education system, the Observer reported. A few months later, Francis dropped out of the Democratic primary race “to avoid a costly primary battle,” according to the paper.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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