A North Dakota school district could decide as early as Friday whether to reverse its decision to reject a yearbook photo of a student holding a rifle, NBC reported.
Fargo North High principal Andy Dahlen refused to publish a photo of student Josh Renville posing with a weapon, prompting Renville’s father to take the issue up with the district’s superintendent, Bob Grosz. Charlie Renville also took his campaign to social media, sharing the photo on his Facebook page with a caption calling for Dahlen to be fired. The post had been been shared more than 1,600 times as of Friday afternoon.
Renville wrote in the post, which was riddled with typographical errors, that the photo is “no different then the pictures in the school library of soldiers during anyone of our nations wars.”
He wrote that to him, the photo, in which his son wears a T-shirt adorned with the stars and stripes and strikes a moody pose next to a large American flag, represented “a kid that loves his nation, loves free speech and loves the 2nd Amendment.”
Dahlen disagreed, saying he had a “gut instinct” that it was not appropriate to publish the photo since weapons are banned from school property. He said that photos of students hunting have appeared in the yearbook before but that “we live in a different time now.”
Superintendent Grosz could hand down a decision on Renville’s photo as early as Friday.
View the photo below:
