Stoughton school to re-raise Pride flag to replace one burned down in June

The Stoughton Central School will re-raise a Pride flag today after the previous flag was burned last June.

Grade 10 student Jessica Baumgartner said the students and staff planned to re-raise a Pride flag as soon as they found out someone had set fire to the first one.

"It was just a matter of how we went about that," she said. "Just so that we would be able to get more knowledge to the students and to the community about what had happened and why it is important that we still continue to raise the flag."

The original plan in June was to raise the rainbow-coloured flag for three nights as part of Pride Month.

The Pride flag had been raised at the K-12 school in the small, southeast Saskatchewan town  about 140 kilometres southeast of Regina in June. Two days after it was raised, staff and students arrived to find someone had set fire to it.

"Since it wasn't able to fly for the full three nights, we're going to give it that chance to do so now," Baumgartner said.

Baumgartner said the flag will fly all day and then be taken down Thursday night.

"Just so that we won't have a repeat of what happened," she said.

She said it is important for the flag to be re-raised.

"We just want to make sure that the LGBTQ students and people in the community still feel included and still feel safe to be who they are," she said. "And it's again just to show respect for them and to make sure that they feel safe to be who they are."

The ceremony will begin just after 11 a.m. today.

"We're going to have a couple of speakers come out and then at 12 o'clock we'll be raising the flag," said Baumgartner, who is on the SRC and a member of the school's gay-straight alliance club.