DADvocate

Three students at William Blount High School in Blount County, Tennessee have sued their school system for not being allowed to wear Confederate flag patches and the such to school.

The William Blount High School students, Derek Barr, Chris Nicole White and Roger Craig White, said they were threatened with suspension if they refused to cover or turn inside out shirts bearing the Confederate emblem.

The school system has a "policy" regarding wearing symbols, etc. to school but appears they have been lax in enforcing it and also overly selective.

"Our policy is that any type of clothing which has graphics, words or pictures that are distracting to the learning process of the school ... are not supposed to be worn," schools spokeswoman Alisa Teffeteller said.

The policy has been on the books for several years, but it had not been enforced until last April when the sheriff's office had to lock down the school amid rising tensions and threats to black students.

The lawsuit claims other students have worn clothing depicting "foreign national flags, Malcolm X symbols and political slogans" without repercussions.

I don't support wearing Confederate flags to school but "foreign national flags, Malcolm X symbols and political slogans" can be just as offensive and disruptive as a Confederate flag, especially in a southern high school. The school system, at the least, needs to be more consistent in its enforcement of its policies and make sure the policies are fairly applied.

A side note to this story is that I first saw it here,channelCincinnati.com. They originally identified William Blount High School as being in Knoxville which it isn't. William Blount High School is in the neighboring county. Apparently channelCincinnati.com corrected the error after I sent them an email pointing it out.

Not a major error but such errors often make me wonder how many other errors major news sources make because they don't check simple, easy to verify facts. I remember watching Nancy Grace cover the shooting of a deputy in Kingston, TN and the finding of the perpetrators vehicle in Erlanger, KY. I used to live near Kingston, TN and now work near Erlanger, KY. I realized immediately that Grace had the distances, the time required to travel from Kingston to Erlanger completely wrong, facts that could have been easily checked using Yahoo Maps. If the news agencies are too lazy or too dim to check these simple facts, what else are they getting wrong?

UPDATE: Here is the link where William Blount High School was incorrectly identified as being a "Knoxville high school."