Detroit Lakes banned rainbows in school. But they’re still up, for now
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It was supposed to be another boring school board meeting.
That’s how most of the summer meetings usually are for Detroit Lakes Public Schools, board member Julie Smith-Yliniemi said, and there was no indication July 27 would be any different.
“We always have something called a bridge meeting the week before, so that we can talk about the agenda or if there's anything that anyone wants to talk about,” she said. “Nothing came up.”
Until the meeting actually started.
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“Right away there was a motion to amend the agenda, and that was a surprise motion to two of us (and) the superintendent,” Smith-Yliniemi said.
That motion added a resolution that would make Detroit Lakes the latest Minnesota school district to ban the display of materials such as rainbow stickers, flags and buttons in schools. The rainbow is a global symbol of LGBTQ+ pride and acceptance dating back to the 1970s.
In this case, the resolution targeted the “safe space” rainbow stickers some teachers have in their classrooms to signal acceptance to students.
The resolution passed 4-2 that same morning, without any public input.
“I was blindsided,” said Smith-Yliniemi, the only board member to respond to MPR’s request for comment. “We were blindsided by this. I'm angry, but I am angry for our community as well because they deserve better than what they have gotten from our board.”
Amidst a backlash from community members, including Smith-Yliniemi, who voted against the ban, the board is now discussing a revised resolution that overhauls district policy about prohibited materials and avoids mentioning rainbows specifically.
And meanwhile, the stickers are still up.
Critics of the rainbow pride ban
The move to ban rainbows surprised many in Detroit Lakes.
“They didn't get a lot of the public conversation before they put this bill into motion, and as a result, a lot of people feel like they were very alienated by the process,” said Rebelle Marie, president of Detroit Lakes Pride.
She said the school board did not seem to be respecting the idea that “the public school is a public institution for the community at large.”
It would be a month before the next school board meeting, and confusion and concern spread throughout the community as to the exact scope of the ban and the effect it would have.
The two-sentence resolution seemed vague enough that it could apply as narrowly to only official school displays or as broadly to banning decals on students’ own backpacks.
“It was written in a way that was too broad, and so it seemed to target teachers, students, staff and parents who are a part of the district and politicize their identity,” Marie said.
On Aug. 24, the public was given its first chance to officially comment on the resolution. Nearly 100 people packed the room. Nineteen people spoke during public comment, and all but three opposed the ban.
Kerry Claypool-Lambert argued the stickers are there to support marginalized students and can save lives. She’s a mother of three children that graduated from Detroit Lakes High School and shared statistics that LGBTQ+ youth are more likely to attempt suicide.
“The one thing that can help these children is affirming spaces and supportive adults,” she said. “Having that can save a life, and by removing this support from schools, you are putting the lives of children like mine at risk.”
Not everyone sees ‘safe space’ stickers as inclusive
On the other side, some supporters of the ban argue that the stickers aren’t politically neutral and therefore shouldn’t be displayed by teachers.
Travis Janich said he’s been asking school administrators to do something about these stickers for years. He’s a pastor at True Life Church in Detroit Lakes and said not everyone sees safe space stickers as inclusive.
At the meeting he shared a letter from a student who wrote they were severely bullied by a peer who identified as LGBTQ+.
But when the student sought help from a teacher, Janich said they didn’t feel comfortable opening up about who had bullied them.
“The student walked up to the door and saw that pride sticker, and they felt that that teacher has already sided with that community, that they couldn't find help,” Janich told MPR in an interview. “And that's where my heart broke.”
He added that all teachers should offer a safe space for all students, so the stickers shouldn’t be necessary.
“It's how we live with each other,” he said. “It's how we communicate with each other. It's building the trust and so — our teachers, our school, our administrators — we need to be building trust in our students that they know they can come talk to us.”
Meeting attendees discussed a new resolution to pause the ban until it could be revised by the district’s legal counsel, who had already urged the board privately not to go through with the ban as written, according to Smith-Yliniemi.
Still, the resolution to delay the ban failed. But the meeting still ended in confusion that hasn’t yet been cleared up publicly.
Board member Sandy Nelson, who introduced the ban and voted against pausing it, was asked by Superintendent Mark Jenson whether the stickers should come down now.
“As far as I'm concerned, no,” Nelson said, telling Jenson to wait until the attorney advised further on the resolution’s language. This caused an uproar in the room, with some asking the board to vote again on the pause to make it official. They did not.
Rainbow ban in limbo
Even though the last successful action by the board was July’s resolution to ban rainbows, the stickers haven’t been removed from teachers’ classrooms, Smith-Yliniemi said.
But that might not be the case for much longer, with another school board meeting looming.
In a work session Tuesday, the board will consider a new version of the district’s policy on the display of “non-school-sponsored materials.”
The new version does not explicitly ban rainbows. But it does remove the recognition of students’ and employees' free speech rights and limits employees from displaying any non-approved flags.
“I believe it is to hide the true intent of what was originally wanted,” Smith-Yliniemi said. “Which is to get these stickers down. They’re trying to find a way to continue that while avoiding legal problems.”
5 years after Marshall’s pride flag dispute
Detroit Lakes is not the first Minnesota community divided over rainbows in schools. A few years ago in southern Minnesota, the city of Marshall wrestled with the issue, too.
In late 2019, Marshall Middle School installed a display of about 30 flags that was meant to celebrate the diverse identities of the students, including the city’s burgeoning immigrant population.
There was also a pride flag.
For more than a year, disputes over the display fueled discord between Mary Kay Thomas, the principal who championed the flags, and members of the school board.
Thomas refused to take down the display and was eventually demoted following a district investigation into her workplace conduct.
She sued, arguing the district retaliated against her for protected speech. Her federal lawsuit was dismissed, and she is currently appealing a Minnesota lawsuit that was also dismissed, according to her attorney David Schlesinger.
Around the same time as Thomas’ demotion, the district settled a separate lawsuit with a group called Marshall Concerned Citizens that opposed the flag. In the settlement, the district agreed to remove the entire display.
It’s been about five years since its removal.
Anne Veldhuisen is a pastor in Marshall and a mom of two middle schoolers. She considers herself an ally of the LGBTQ+ community.
She said while the flag came down, more good has actually come from the controversy than bad.
“For the city of Marshall and for the surrounding communities, it became a way for us to rally together,” she said.
For example, the city’s annual Pride festival was born out of the controversy. Activist Julie Walker, who’s also director of the LGBTQ+ Center at Southwest Minnesota State University, co-founded it.
“We sat at a picnic table and we said, ‘We need to figure out ways that we can show queer kids that while there is this lawsuit happening in town, that there is also a lot more acceptance than what they might be able to visibly see in town,’” Walker said.
This year marked the city’s sixth Pride celebration.
Veldhuisen said in recent years, there are also more spaces out in the community that are openly inclusive, like the Brau Brothers Brewery in Marshall, which hosts an annual drag show.
“But beyond just these events, to walk around our town or the surrounding communities, there is a sense of welcome and a sense of understanding that each person's journey is a little bit different from the next,” Veldhuisen said.
But there’s still work to do, Walker said.
“We have many businesses and organizations and even individuals who say, ‘I would love to support this. I would love to provide these resources. But I need to do so anonymously because I'm afraid of some of the pushback in this area,’” she said.
Inside the middle school, a gay-straight alliance, or GSA, club formed while the flag was still up.
“Students were being harassed for being a part of the club,” she said. “Students were having their club posters taken off the wall and ripped in half in front of them. There were threats against students in the school district.”
The club hasn’t met regularly for years. Walker said it’s been hard finding an advisor as the public conversation around LGBTQ+ issues has grown more heated in recent years.
“We’re in an age right now where there’s risks associated with being an advisor and meeting in that public way, especially in a public school,” she said.
Walker, whose children identify as LGBTQ+ in the Marshall school district, said she’s worried about the mental health of students in Detroit Lakes who don’t know who they can trust.
In the absence of the stickers, she said adults in Detroit Lakes will need to make an extra effort to signal their safety.
“As a queer person myself, I don't assume that I'm safe in any space that I enter,” she said. “I think the concern is that we're removing these visible spaces that tell kids that they're safe.”
Special thanks to Danger Boat Productions and the Minnesota Humanities Center for their Sketches of Minnesota events around the state that helped inform this report.
