Central Bucks school board to vote on policy banning staff ‘advocacy,’ including Pride flags

The Central Bucks school board is slated to vote Tuesday night on a policy that would ban staff members from advocating to students about “partisan, political or social policy issues,” which the board president says would include the display of Pride flags.

The proposal has drawn fierce opposition, including from the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which cited an earlier version of the policy in a federal complaint filed in October accusing the district of creating a hostile environment for LGBTQ students. The U.S. Department of Education is investigating.

Students at Central Bucks West and South high schools opposed to the policy on Tuesday passed out several hundred bags of Lay’s chips that were instead labeled “Gay’s,” with information about the vote.

“I think students are going to be put in really unsafe situations where they don’t know what teacher they can turn to,” while “teachers are going to be constantly looking over their back — ‘If I say this, am I going to get fired,’” said Zandi Hall, a Central Bucks West senior who organized the demonstration.

The school board, which says it’s trying to create a neutral environment for students, tabled the policy in November while announcing it had hired former U.S. attorney Bill McSwain and the Duane Morris law firm to conduct an internal investigation of the ACLU complaint.

It then took up a new version during a committee meeting last month. The latest proposal — revised at the recommendation of Duane Morris — no longer refers directly to “beliefs about sexual orientation” or “beliefs about gender identity” as issues teachers cannot advocate to students.

But critics including the ACLU contend that’s what the district is targeting — noting that its superintendent, Abram Lucabaugh, said last year that the district had asked teachers to remove Pride flags, which he likened to political symbols.

The school board’s president, Dana Hunter, said in a statement last month that the policy — which says classrooms should be “places of education, not indoctrination” — would ban Pride flags, “just as it would prohibit, for example, the display of Blue Lives Matter flags, antiabortion flags or any other flags that advocate on social policy issues.”

ACLU attorneys have also criticized the policy as overbroad, warning of a chilling effect on teachers who self-censor because they aren’t sure what topics are permissible to discuss.

If the Republican-majority board approves the policy, Central Bucks will join the Pennridge School District, also in Bucks County, in enacting a ban related to teacher advocacy. The day after Pennridge’s school board passed its policy in September, the district’s superintendent directed staff members to remove all “advocacy materials,” including Pride flags and crosses, from classrooms.

The Central Bucks board originally planned for more discussion on the policy at Tuesday’s 7 p.m. meeting, but instead decided to schedule a final vote.