Proposal to display Ten Commandments on poster with other ‘founding documents’ in Iredell-Statesville Schools shot down

TROUTMAN, N.C. ( QUEEN CITY NEWS ) — School board member Brian Sloan warned it was a hot topic, and it turned out a poster he proposed for Iredell-Statesville Schools was scalding.

At Monday night’s board meeting, Sloan proposed placing “founding documents” posters in every ISS school. Those posters would have images of the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, and the Ten Commandments.

“I don’t think I’ll make anybody happy, and I’ve got a lot of time and money invested in this,” Sloan told the board.

For other board members, it wasn’t necessarily about making them happy, as it was about following the law.

“I took an oath to uphold the constitution of the state of North Carolina,” said board member Doug Knight. “This is a legal question to me, not a question of religion, and it can’t be. Then it can’t be legal at all in the state of North Carolina. It’s got to be on a historical documents basis. As presented in its current form, I don’t think it would correlate with state law.”

Sloan even tried to amend his poster by making the two United States founding documents appear more clearly than the Biblical one, even blurring out the Commandments.

But at the end of the day, that didn’t matter. A motion from Mike Kubiniec to postpone the vote to the November meeting was shot down, 3-4, thereby killing the proposal.

“I don’t want to pay (a law firm) to take something all the way to the Supreme Court … that’s a lot of legal fees,” Knight said. “We have to go into fund balance for local stuff. This is going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don’t want to lose that money that we would use for nurses, counselors, teachers that we have.”

Knight and Anita Kurn both alluded to the Stone v. Graham case that found a Kentucky statute allowing the Ten Commandments in schools unconstitutional. Kurn believed there was a chance it could pass the court-established “Lemon Test” if Sloan agreed to make it more “artistic.”

“No ma’am, I won’t hide behind artwork,” he responded.

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