Latarndra Strong spent most of 2017 lobbying the Orange County Schools Board of Education for a dress code that would ban the Confederate flag from school grounds. For her efforts, she has been named The Triangle Tribune’s Newsmaker of the Year.
Strong spoke at school board meetings throughout the beginning of the year on behalf of the organization she founded – the Hate Free Schools Coalition – asking for the policy change. But the Tribune also recognizes Strong for her role as “a foster parent to 17 teenagers over the past decade” and her work helping people in her church, “including inviting a single mother and her children to live with her while she got back on her feet.”
On the dress code policy, it did not look like there would be an outright ban in the initial drafts.
One version came before the school board in June that would ban “racially intimidating” attire, which the board unanimously approved on its first reading. But when it came back for a second vote, the policy was sent back to committee by a 4-3 vote because some felt the policy was not inclusive enough.
A revised version that expanded protected classes in the policy, but still did not put an outright ban on the Confederate flag, made its way back before the school board with a vote scheduled for Monday, August 14.
The weekend before that vote, a counterprotester was killed at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Citing that Virginia rally at the board meeting, the policy was revised to put an outright ban on the Confederate flag, the swastika or other symbols of oppression.
The Tribune noted that Strong’s lobbying and vision for the project moving forward warranted her being named Newsmaker of the Year.
The Triangle Tribune publication is marketed as “The Voice of the Black Community” and serves Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Cary.
Photo via Hate Free Schools Coalition Facebook
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