Cranston School Committee to decide at February 16 meeting
whether to appeal judge’s ruling that prayer mural must be removed.
By Linda Felaco
Anticipating a capacity crowd, the Cranston School Committee
has announced that its February 16 meeting—during which it will decide whether
to appeal a federal judge’s order that it remove the 49-year-old prayer mural
from the Cranston High School West auditorium—will be held
in the auditorium of Cranston High School East rather than at Western Hills
Middle School, where their meetings are normally held.
U.S.
District Judge Ronald R. Lagueux’s January 11 ruling that the
mural is unconstitutional and must be removed sparked an immediate outcry
from proponents of the mural. A pair of Cranston West alumni created a “Preserve the Banner” T-shirt
and corresponding
Facebook page to raise funds for removing the mural intact and preserving
it. The student who initiated the case, Jessica
Ahlquist, was subjected to threats and cyberbullying. Rather than remove the mural immediately as ordered, school administrators covered it with a tarp.
As the lawyers for the winning plaintiffs in a constitutional
case, federal law gives the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil
Liberties Union the right to recover attorneys’ fees from the defendants, and on
Tuesday they asked the U.S. District Court to award them $173,000 in fees.
I find this unfortunate, since ultimately it’s the students of the Cranston
public schools who will pay rather than the school committee members whose
refusal to remove the mural led to the court case. I wish the ACLU had seen fit
to absorb the costs of the case rather than punish the students for the ill-advised
actions of the school committee.
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| Jessica Ahlquist told the crowd at a school committee meeting shortly after the judge ruled in her favor, "This is not about religion; it's about the constitution." |
Meanwhile, the school committee has been exploring its
options for what, if initiated, is certain to be a costly and fruitless appeal
of the ruling. They’ve consulted with a constitutional scholar on whether they
could argue for keeping the mural on historical grounds. Unfortunately, since
the complaint was first made about the mural, they’ve repeatedly undermined the
historical argument through their statements in favor of keeping it up on
religious grounds. And as Wendy Kaminer points out in The Atlantic, “the
long duration of a constitutional violation does not mitigate its seriousness.”
The constitutional scholar informed the school committee that
if the mural had been in place prior to
the landmark 1962 Supreme Court ruling striking down school prayer, they might
have had a case, but given that the mural was installed the year after the ruling, it creates the
appearance that it was done to deliberately defy the ruling. Their case is
further muddied by the fact that when the complaint was made about the Cranston
West mural, school administrators immediately removed the school prayer and
school creed murals at Hugh B. Bain Middle School, which had been in place
since 1920 and were virtually identical to the ones at West.
Cranston Mayor Allan Fung supports keeping the banner, but
he believes the cost of an appeal is not worth the risk. As he told the Cranston Herald, “after
reading the judge’s decision and basically facing the financial pressures that
we are in, I cannot in good conscience support an appeal.”
Perhaps David Smith summed it up best in the headline of his
editorial in this week’s Charlestown
Press: “Banner
doesn’t have a prayer.”