Why Paso Robles schools should adopt a one flag policy

September 19, 2026

District Trustee Kenney Enney

By KENNEY ENNEY

On the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, and in the year of America’s 250th birthday, Paso Robles Joint Unified School District (PRJUSD) should do something simple and overdue: fly only the United States flag and the California flag on school poles and in district-controlled classrooms and common spaces.

The republic whose 250th anniversary we are celebrating this year was founded so that no official would get to prescribe a single orthodoxy in politics or religion. The country we share was attacked for what it is.  School walls are the last place to forget either lesson.

Sept. 11 still teaches us what a common banner is for. Firefighters, office workers, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and people of no faith at all died in the same buildings under the same flag.

In the days after, Americans hung that flag because it named a people, not a faction. It did not ask what you believed about God or sex. It asked whether we are in this country together.

The Semiquincentennial asks the same question in a quieter key. Two hundred fifty years after the Declaration, the American government does not pick a church, but neither can it replace the church with a substitute creed and call the substitute “inclusion.”

Public schools exist to form American citizens who can live with deep disagreement. Do we want trustees and administrators to allow teachers to hang the winning side’s symbol over the loser?

A U.S. and California flag policy is how a district honors both dates without turning classrooms into chapels or temples for the latest cause. The “Pride” flag is not a neutral welcome mat. Defenders say a “Pride” flag is only kindness, while a Christian flag is “religion.” That distinction does not survive contact with how the symbol is actually used.

In my time as a PRJUSD trustee, I have been told by dozens of students that they do not feel welcome in classrooms where the teacher fly a “Pride” flag or displays other LGBTQ propaganda.

Religion, for First Amendment purposes, is not only stained glass and a deity. It is a comprehensive account of the person. What is sacred? What is forbidden? Which calendar we keep? and which dissent is sin?

The “Pride” flag now does that work. It carries a story about the body, sex, and identity. It has a “holy season,” “Pride Month” and “Coming Out” week where children make public professions, all of which have been celebrated in PRJUSD.

It treats affirmation as a moral duty and disagreement as harm, and has punished students and faculty alike for not bending the knee to their religion. The rainbow itself is older covenant imagery, reassigned to a new covenant of the self.

You can fly that flag as personal solidarity. A public school cannot treat it as official décor and then claim it has stayed out of theology. When PRJUSD, or any teacher acting with the district’s permission, hangs that banner as the face of the classroom, it is endorsing a view of human nature.

When the same district would treat a Christian flag as an establishment of religion, it has already admitted the first symbol is a worldview and then denied the second is one. That is not neutrality. It is a preferred church with better branding.

The Supreme Court has been clear that the government may not open space to speech about family, identity, and values and then exclude the religious view of those same subjects. “Shurtleff”, “Rosenberger,” and “Lamb’s Chapel” are not technicalities. They are the rule against second-class treatment of religious speech.

A district that blesses one comprehensive doctrine on the wall and bans the other is picking a side. “Mahmoud v. Taylor” further recognized that official LGBTQ-themed instruction can burden parents’ right to raise their children in their faith. A silent flag is not a lesson plan, but using school property to preach one anthropology while forbidding another is the same instinct in fabric.

The American and California flags do not settle the argument about marriage or gender. That is their virtue. They name the political community in which that argument is supposed to continue; in families, churches, elections, and the courts, not as a loyalty test on a classroom wall.

Students who are gay, straight, Christian, secular, immigrant, or native-born can all stand under those two flags without being asked to recant. That is inclusion that does not require a child to salute someone else’s creed. It is also the only rule that is administrable.

Ban unofficial flags, or allow every faction a banner. Allow only the civic flags and you establish the “inclusive” environment that the teachers and administrators claim they desire.  Afterwards, teachers can teach math.

The PRJUSD board should adopt a one flag policy. The move would be supported by the U.S. Constitution and multiple Supreme Court decisions. They would join a growing list of school districts and states who have already done so. Adopt the following written policy:

“No flag other than the United States of America and State of California may be displayed on school grounds or in classrooms, unless it is a country, state, or United States military flag used solely for educational purposes within the adopted curriculum. This includes posters, digital displays, flyers, and any other related display.

Any other flag must be approved by the superintendent or the superintendent’s designee prior to displaying if, and only if, it is used for educational purposes and only during the related instructional period. Exceptions may be made for displays of school championship flags, flags associated with academic achievement, college/university flags and various national flags within classrooms, recreational rooms, or gymnasiums. Student clubs may display materials (e.g. flags, fliers, banners) representing their club when advertising and during club meetings and events.”

On a day when we remember people who died under one flag, and in a year when we mark 250 years of a country that refused an official church, Paso Robles schools should look like they belong to the public. Not to a movement. Not to a denomination. To the students who have to walk in tomorrow and learn together anyway.

Fly the two flags that still mean all of us. Take the rest down.