chedstone.com

Two students in Bristol, Vt., who put up a statue of Jesus in their high school said their freedom of speech was violated when they were asked to take it down. Torin Olivetti and Galen Helms placed the 60-centimeter-tall statue in a balcony overlooking the main lobby as a project for their Advanced Placement English class. The students said they were inspired by the play they were required to read, “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail,” about Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes in a protest against the U.S. war in Mexico. Helms, 18, said he is not a Christian but was protesting the school’s hypocrisy of allowing “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and a mural of Apollo, a Greek god, but banning the statue.

Mount Abraham Union High School principal Paulette Bogan said that at the time she questioned the students, they “certainly did not convey that it was a project on religious symbols, anything but,”

Good job Paulette!