After the high school girl filed a lawsuit against the rural Colorado school district, a federal judge ruled on Friday that the district can prevent the student from wearing a sash with the flags of both Mexico and the United States at her graduation this weekend.
Wearing a sash during a graduation ceremony is considered school-sponsored speech, not the student’s private speech, according to Judge Nina Y. Wang’s ruling. This means that “the School District is permitted to restrict that speech as it sees fit in the interest of the kind of graduation it would like to hold,” Wang said.
The student had requested a temporary restraining order, which had it not been denied in time, would have allowed her to wear the sash on Saturday at graduation. A final decision is yet to be made, but Wang decided that the student and her solicitors had not demonstrated their chances of success sufficiently.
It’s the most recent disagreement on the appropriateness of cultural graduation apparel during commencement exercises in the United States, with a lot of attention being paid to tribal regalia.
In a hearing held on Friday in Denver, Naomi Pea Villasano’s attorneys claimed that the decision made by the school system infringes upon her right to free speech. They added that it was contradictory for the district to permit Native American clothing but not Pea Villasano’s sash, which was a symbol of her history. The Mexican and American flags are displayed on opposite sides of the sash.
She said, “I’m a 200 percenter — 100% American and 100% Mexican,” during a recent school board meeting in the Western Slope of rural Colorado.
At the hearing on Friday, her attorney Kenneth Parreno from the Mexican American Legal Defence and Educational Fund claimed that “the district is discriminating against the expression of different cultural heritages.”
After landing at the international airport in the city of Leon in central Mexico, President George W. Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox walk down a red carpet while Mexican schoolchildren wave the American and Mexican flags. Getty Images Glenn Asakawa/The Denver Post)
The Garfield County School District 16’s counsel replied that wearing Native American regalia is necessary to be permitted in Colorado and is qualitatively distinct from donning a nation’s flag. According to Holly Ortiz, allowing Pea Villasano to wear the American and Mexican flags as a sash could allow “the door to offensive material.”
Ortiz went on to say that the district doesn’t want to restrict Pea Villasano’s freedom of expression and that the graduate is free to wear the sash or decorate her cap with flags before or after the ceremony.
But according to Ortiz, “she doesn’t have a right to express it in any way she wants.”
Wang agreed with the school board and stated that “the School District could freely permit one sash and prohibit another.”
This graduation season, similar arguments have occurred all around the United States.
A Mississippi school system was sued by a transgender student because it forbade her from wearing a dress to graduation. In Oklahoma, a former Native American student sued the school district after it took a feather from her cap before the 2022 graduation ceremony. The feather was a precious religious artefact.
Jolynn White, a mother of two students, holds a placard that reads, “Teachers are Essential,” during a rally against the district’s choice on Friday in Denver, Colorado, in front of the Denver Public Schools Administration Building. 30 October 2020. Less than a week after Denver Public Schools allowed all primary children back into its buildings, the district has made the decision to send many of them back to distance learning as the city of Denver enforces more community restrictions to stop the spread of COVID-19. (Getty Images)
Voted for impeachment by the Texas House on Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.
For Native American students around the nation, the definition of appropriate graduation dress has been a subject of contention. On Thursday, regulations permitting Native American students to dress in religious and traditional regalia at graduation ceremonies were passed in both Nevada and Oklahoma.
A law prohibiting preventing Native American kids from donning such regalia was passed in Colorado this year. The statutes are the same in about a dozen states.
