“From kindergarten to 12th grade, we’ve been told by our parents, friends and teachers to be ourselves,” Brown County High School senior Lilee DeLoach told the school board. “Now that it’s finally time to walk across the stage at the graduation ceremony, we’d like to carry these words with us.”
DeLoach, Macie Morris, Evelyn Crimmins and Jackson McPheeters all attended the April 18 meeting as the Brown County High School Graduation Committee to ask the board to approve a plan that would allow them to decorate their graduation caps.
Five years ago, the school board banned decorating graduation caps for the ceremony after a student in the Class of 2014 put a Confederate flag on his cap, offending the keynote speaker and his guests in the audience, who were black.
The photo of the cap appeared in a Brown County Democrat photo gallery from graduation. It spawned a conversation on social media involving responses from five states and separate re-posts involving hundreds of comments.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]The Class of 2019 wants another chance to express themselves one last time as high school students.
DeLoach would like to decorate her cap with a quote from her favorite speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in Indianapolis the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated: “‘Let us dedicate ourselves to taming the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.’ I want to put ‘Make gentle the life of this world’ on my cap with a sunflower in the background,” she said.
Morris’ decoration plans have an even deeper meaning. She lost both of her parents when she was in high school. Whenever she achieved anything, her parents’ response was: “Amazing.”
“I just want to put the word ‘Amazing’ on my cap because I’m really proud of myself,” she said. “I think it’s really important to me to have them with me in some sort of way.”
The board took the group’s plans under advisement and will vote on them at their May 2 meeting.
Proposed rules
DeLoach started thinking about coming up with a plan to allow students to decorate their caps early in the school year. She asked Morris, Crimmins and McPheeters for help.
They worked with Principal Matt Stark on allowing students to decorate their caps, as long as the students and their parents sign a waiver agreeing to the rules of acceptable and unacceptable designs.
According to the students’ plan, acceptable designs are related to the college students plan to attend; the career path they plan to take; activities enjoyed in high school; hobbies; quotes; a message thanking parents, teachers or organizations; and their graduation year.
Unacceptable designs are symbols that “have ever, or still, represent hateful or obscene content or language,” such as sexual innuendos and discrimination; illegal references, such as to drugs, gangs or weapons; or hate speech and symbols.
Decorations also must be flat; no 3D, moving, light-up or hanging decor will be allowed.
Any deviation from the rules will result in not being allowed to walk across the stage at graduation. The waiver also states that the student understands that “any and all decoration that Mr. Stark and his selected administration deem inappropriate will not be allowed on the cap or in the ceremony.”
At the April 18 board meeting, Superintendent Laura Hammack suggested it be required that parents sign the waiver even if the student is 18.
Cap designs will go through a pre-approval process, with advisory period teachers signing off on the designs before they head to Stark for his approval.
Once the students decorate their caps, they will hand them in the day of graduation rehearsal and will leave them to ensure no last-minute changes are made. If the student fails to wear the same design they had approved, they will have the cap removed and the school will provide a plain cap for them to wear. If the student decides they want to wear the unapproved cap, they will not be able to walk at graduation, the students’ plan says.
‘It’s about expression’
In recent years, each graduate has worn the same blue graduation robes. The only items that might make them stand out are their shoes and the colored cords they might be wearing because of academic achievements and extracurricular activities.
“It’s about expression. We’re told all of our lives to be ourselves, and on one of the most important days of our lives we aren’t allowed to do that, so I felt that it just needed to be changed,” DeLoach said.
“We’re proud of what we’ve been able to achieve ever since we started kindergarten all the way up until now. … Now we’re here and we’re going to the next phase of our lives, we get to show people what that phase will be,” McPheeters said.
“I think it shows that even though we all are different people, we can still come together and celebrate each other even with all of the different ideas we all have on everything,” Crimmins added.
“It’s important to be able to express yourself as you’re literally walking out of the school,” Morris said.
At the board meeting, McPheeters said the committee had gathered 204 signatures of students from multiple grades who wanted to be able to decorate their caps.
Board member Stephanie Kritzer asked if the students would bring an offensive graduation cap design to the attention of an administrator and if they felt their classmates would do the same. The students responded yes to both.
Before decorating graduation caps was banned, there were no rules in place setting limits on what can be displayed on the caps, the students said. “It was just like, ‘Show up. Follow your school rules that nobody really listens to,’” Crimmins said.
The students said that the decision to ban all decorations for caps was a “knee-jerk reaction.”
“We can understand how that decision was made and we understand how it deeply affected the school board; we just think it was too fast. There are other ways you can work around it instead of just pulling that right away from your students,” DeLoach said.
In preparing this plan, the students researched the guidelines from other schools to help prevent another incident like the one involving the rebel flag. DeLoach said most of their guidelines came from Ivy Tech Community College’s graduation cap guidelines.
“I think that we can all agree in the unacceptable section it states that nothing you put on your cap should have ever or still represents hate or discrimination — anything that will cause harm to anyone’s emotions or them in general. I think that closes the loophole of (rebel) flags,” Morris said.
“Even though there are still some people who say that it’s not offensive, the fact that we have the waiver set in place allows Mr. Stark to have final say,” DeLoach added.
“Hopefully this is something that gets to be around longer than our class,” DeLoach said.
“We don’t want this just for us, we want it for every class after us.”
