ATLANTA, GA — A charter school in Atlanta has canceled the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance during morning assemblies, saying the change is a nod to an increasing number of students who weren’t taking part in the tradition.
“This decision was made in an effort to begin our day as a fully inclusive and connected community,” officials at Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School said in a letter to parents this week.
The letter, written by elementary school Principal Lara Zelski, said that, instead, students will stand to participate in the school’s “Wolf Pack Chant.”
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According to the letter, a significant number of students at the school had not been participating in the pledge.
“Over the past couple of years it has become increasingly obvious that more and more of our community were choosing to not stand and/or recite the pledge,” the letter said. “There are many emotions around this and we want everyone in our school family to start their day in a positive manner. After all, that is the whole purpose of our morning meeting.”
Zelski wrote that students will be given the opportunity to say the pledge in their classrooms at another time during the school day. The letter also said that, in the next few weeks, elementary school teachers and others will be working with students to create a new school pledge that can be recited each morning.
‘This pledge will focus on students’ civic responsibility to their school family, community, country and our global society,” Zelski wrote. “I will keep you informed of the progress with this. I am really looking forward to what our students create.”
On Thursday, as news reports about the decision were circulating, Lia Santos, chairwoman of the school’s governing board, released a statement attempting to clarify the change. She wrote that students’ opportunity to recite the Pledge of Allegiance had simply been “moved from the auditorium to the classrooms.”
“It has always been the practice of ANCS to provide students with an opportunity to recite the Pledge of Allegiance each school day. This remains a practice today,” she wrote in the post, which was shared on the school’s Facebook page. “Typically this has been done during our all-school morning meeting at the elementary campus, but at the start of this year it was moved to classrooms.
“It appears there was some miscommunication and inconsistency in the roll out which was addressed with the entire staff yesterday afternoon.”
Santos’s post said administrators are working to inform parents and others in the school community about the change and to hear their “concerns and feedback.”
“It is our commitment to continue gathering perspectives and being collaborative with the school family,” she wrote.
Founded in 2011, Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School, with classes in kindergarten through eighth grade, has a mission statement that calls for creating “a community of deeply engaged families and educators working to foster extraordinary levels of student achievement in an inclusive, constructivist learning environment that values every individual and prepares students to be effective citizens in a diverse global society.”
The announcement met with criticism in some quarters online. While some social media users were praising the change on Thursday, others decried it as unpatriotic and linked it to NFL players who last season took a knee during the National Anthem to protest racial injustice and police violence.
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