Florida school yearbook on hold over student protest photos

LONGWOOD, Fla. — Yearbooks at a central Florida high school won’t be distributed until images of students holding rainbow flags and a “love is love” sign while protesting the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law can be covered up.

District officials said they don’t want anyone thinking that the school supported the students’ walkout.

Lyman High School Principal Michael Hunter said in a statement Monday that “pictures and descriptions” documenting a student walk-out in March in response to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law should have been “caught earlier in the review process.”

The bill, signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.

“Rather than reprinting the yearbook at substantial cost and delay, we have elected to cover that material that is out of compliance with board policy so that yearbooks can be distributed as soon as possible,” the principal’s statement said.

In an email Tuesday, Seminole County Public Schools spokesman Michael Lawrence said the issue wasn’t with the protest but how its depiction in the yearbook could be interpreted as being endorsed by the school, which would be in violation of the school board’s policy.

Lawrence noted that the yearbook dedicates a separate page to the school’s Gay Straight Alliance Club and elsewhere shows students at a pride march and holding rainbow flags. He said those depictions do comply with the policy.

“The issue at hand here is not the photos or the topic for which the students were protesting,” Lawrence said. “If these items were caught earlier prior to print, some simple editing/tweaking likely could’ve occurred to make that section in compliance prior to…