This time, it's not about what they won't allow, but what they will allow. A school alumnus donated a bronze tiger statue to the high school that displays the Jewish Star of David.

You might remember just last month when the school caused national and even overseas controversy when it decided to ban a T-shirt designed for the school's band. The shirt used Darwin's famous drawings of the evolution of man to show the evolution of brass instruments over the years. Now, many critics are accusing school officials of being hypocrites and of using separation of church and state to keep science out of classrooms while prominently displaying religious symbols.

Sedalia's superintendent of schools, Harriet Wolfe, says the two situations are completely different. She says officials banned the shirt because it was a group shirt and could have been forcing evolution on a student who didn't support the theory.  But she says the statue doesn't force a belief on anyone and that the Star of David on its plaque is like the signature of the donating group.
 
Carl Esbeck, a law professor at MU, said that if a school accepts a gift, any symbolic speech that gift communicates becomes the speech of the school. However, he added that the established policies and the consistency of their implementation are important factors when determining if that speech is constitutional.
 
The man responsible for donating the statue for Sedalians of Jewish Faith, Jack Isgur, says that the statue's plaque is being taken entirely out of context and isn't displayed for religious reasons at all, but actually for historic ones.
 
Underneath the Star of David, the statue's plaque reads, "Sedalians of Jewish Faith (1860-2009.)" Earlier this year, Sedalia's Jewish organization relocated to Columbia. Isgur says the plaque is simply a remembrance of part of the community that had existed since the 1800s and is now gone. He also says that it is completely coincidental that the statue was erected only four days after the T-shirt controversy broke and that the gift to the school was in the works long before the T-shirt was even made.
 
Superintendent Wolfe called the statue a non-issue. But after the district banned one supposedly religious image, community members are suspicious of others they might allow.

A spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Education had no comment on the issue, but did acknowledge that the organization had received complaints over the statue.

Reported by Michael Amantea