No more rainbow stickers? Manatee School Board debates ‘political’ advocacy ban
Manatee County School Board members are considering a policy that would restrict teachers from showing support for social movements and equality issues.
At the school board’s workshop meeting on Tuesday, board members debated a policy that would prohibit staff from “engaging in political activism” on school grounds. The discussion centered on what teachers should be allowed to display, ranging from political candidate merch to posters that advocate for equality issues, such as LGBTQ+ rights and Black Lives Matter.
“We have to do something to stop that from happening,” School Board Member Richard Tatem said. “There are posters on doors that are 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide, promoting, you know, ‘Power to the whatever.’ And this has to stop.”
The proposed policy would add to one of the district’s policies prohibiting school staff members from participating in political campaigns while on duty.
This addition would tighten the policy by noting that teachers “are prohibited from engaging in political activities on campus as defined by verbally or displaying on self or in the classroom any political or campaign related materials.”
School Board debates prohibiting ‘political’ references
Tatem said he heard about a high school student being harassed by another teacher for the student’s “more traditional values on marriage and family,” which is a policy violation, Board Member Charlie Kennedy pointed out.
But Tatem added that he saw a counselor at another school with “certain stickers on their door” that he said might make a student with more traditional views feel like they can’t talk to that counselor. Tatem later clarified that they were rainbow stickers.
“In my definition, that’s not, to me, political activity,” Kennedy said. “You’re not advocating for an issue or a candidate.”
“Well it is advocating for an issue. It’s advocating for civil rights for certain groups of people,” Tatem responded.
Kennedy rebutted that a staff member supporting things like LGBT issues is them expressing their personal beliefs, not advocating for a specific campaign or person.
“If I’m a counselor at a school and I put a confederate flag sticker…on the window of my office, we all know what that is. It’s political activism,” Tatem said. “Stickers, Black Lives Matter stickers, rainbow stickers, Trump lanyards, posters that support, you know, certain power or certain genders and certain races. It’s all going on in the school system, and it should stop. It needs to stop.”
Board members debated what constitutes “political activism,” and other definitions of this policy were in place. They also talked about whether it would apply to teachers who may attend events on school grounds, like sporting events.
Another board member, Cindy Spray, suggested “personal displays” might also need to be included in the language of the policy. That could mean limiting what photos teachers display of their families.
“I don’t want to step on people’s rights, but we have to go back to our primary function in our classrooms is to educate our students, period stop. Not to push on our personal opinions and ideology onto that classroom, any of our students,” Spray said.
However, Board Member Heather Felton pushed back on that argument, cautioning the board that the district can not ban photos of families on a teacher’s desk, for example, if a teacher is married to someone of the same gender.
“There are things that we cannot tell people they can’t have due to the Equality Florida settlement…like, for example, I ran the Gay-Straight Alliance in my school… I had a rainbow flag in my room. No kid ever felt uncomfortable coming into my classroom because it was in there, but that was there for those kids to let them know that was the safe place they can be theirselves,” Felton said.
The Equality Florida v. DeSantis settlement stems from a case filed in 2022 that challenged the “Parental Rights in Education” law. The settlement protects discrimination toward LGBTQ+ students and educators by protecting Gay-Straight Alliances and the right for teachers to have a photo of their family, including a personal photo of a same-sex couple.
“We’ve got to make sure that (district attorneys) are handling all of this, because otherwise, we are going to be in a whole lot of trouble if we try and enact policy that goes against established law,” Felton said.
After the board’s discussion about what may fall under this policy, Superintendent Laurie Breslin said the district’s attorneys would guide how the policy is written based on the discussion.
“Relying on past legal cases and decisions is really what should guide our policy-making,” Breslin said.
Reached for comment, Manatee Education Association President Pat Barber said she hasn’t heard of any political advocacy violations, and that teachers know the restraints of the current policy.
“It seems to me that the discussion about adding new language to the policy is unnecessary and is more a matter of raising awareness and monitoring and enforcing the current policy rather than changing the policy,” said Barber, the leader of the local teachers union.
Associate Superintendent Kevin Chapman said he would work with the district’s attorneys to modify the proposal based on the board’s discussion and bring it back.
This story was originally published April 6, 2026 at 5:50 AM.
