TV news cameras were squeezed into a packed room at Thursday night’s Chapel Hill-Carrboro Board of Education meeting.

Many at Town Hall were outraged by a recent Instagram photo that has made national news. Two East Chapel High School students are shown waving Confederate flags, with the caption “South will rise.”

“The flag – the Confederate flag – there’s nothing cute about it, and how dare some of you try to whitewash it,” said NC NAACP Executive Director Michelle Laws as she spoke at the podium during Thursday night’s public comments.

She, like many others in attendance, was there to call for employees of the school system to better educate themselves on cultural sensitivity, so that they can pass those lessons on to students.

The Instagram photo, which has now become national news, was taken during an annual trip to Gettysburg, where East Chapel Hill High School students re-enact Pickett’s Charge, a disastrous battle for the Confederate Army.

One senior from East Chapel Hill High stood during Thursday’s meeting and gave her account of the Gettysburg re-enactment. She said the two students in the photo were simply the last left standing, as they were instructed.

Ron Creatore, the father of one of those students, had already defended his daughter on Wednesday, during a heated exchange with Laws at a news conference.

At Thursday’s meeting, he said that his daughter has been vilified and threatened for holding an object that never seemed to outrage the local community before.

“To my knowledge, there has never been any kind of uprising in the community about the fact that the Confederate flag appears three times in a book that’s being used in our school system,” said Creatore.

He also mentioned a piece in a 2012 issue of the ECHO – East Chapel Hill High’s student newspaper. It was titled “The Confederate flag is heritage, not hateful.” Creatore noted that the author of the piece suffered no consequences.

Greg McElveen, chair of the NAACP Education Committee, said the Gettysburg incident exemplifies the failure of the school system to teach in a “culturally relevant and equitable way.”

“Instructing students to make the charge … is almost like going to a concentration camp and asking the students to pretend that they are guards,” said McElveen.

Eighteen-year-old Taliana Tudryn, a senior at Carrboro High School, drew the night’s biggest ovation.

She spoke about the realities of being a student of color in public high schools, where AP classes are mostly white.

“We struggle with Ferguson, and Baltimore, and Durham, and Mike Brown, and Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner alone, in small groups” said Tudryn. “We may even go to marches and face riot officers and sound cannons, and witness others being beat by batons.

“Then, we come back into the classroom, and our white peers, our teachers, our administrators are silent.”

Tudryn shared some student proposals: annual assemblies at middle schools and high schools, with interactive presentations exploring systemic racism; and requiring teachers to attend Racial Equity Institute Workshops.

CHCCS Superintendent Tom Forcella concluded the discussion, first by noting that the school system needs to take a closer look at how social media affects students’ lives before they reach high school.

“First and foremost, I do believe our entire staff needs to take responsibility for addressing issues that seem unfair to any individual or sub-group,” he said.

As for individual consequences and disciplinary measures within the school system, Forcella reminded the audience that those must remain private.