Naked City

Former Katherine Anne Porter School art teacher Grady Roper says he was fired for protesting the school board's decision to whitewash a school mural that contained, among other images, a small painting of two men kissing. (Photo By John Anderson)

The village of Wimberley, Texas, a small, recently incorporated community of ex-hippies, third- and fourth-generation Texans, and artists who fled Austin seeking small-town tranquility, has long enjoyed a reputation as a laid-back enclave of rural eccentricity. But lately, for students and teachers at a small, year-old Wimberley charter school, the presence of a small but vocal clique of conservative Christians has been increasingly difficult to ignore. Two weeks ago, the age-old dispute over how much student expression should be allowed in public schools came to a climax at the Katherine Anne Porter School, culminating in the whitewashing of a student-created mural, the firing of a popular art teacher, and a debate over the appropriate use of public school property.

The trouble started, teachers at the Porter School say, when a senior art student, Larry McDowell, painted an image of two men kissing as part of a large mural on one of the school's permanent walls. The offending image, which McDowell's former art teacher Grady Roper and others at the school say was less than two feet square, was so irksome to two of the charter school's board members that they demanded the image be excised from the mural or painted over. Two weeks after a faculty meeting at which all 23 members of the school's faculty and staff reportedly agreed that the mural should remain intact, the five-member school board decided that the painting was inappropriate and took matters into their own hands. On Monday morning, Oct. 16, students and teachers arriving at the school were greeted by a bright, white wall where the 30-by-10-foot mural had been.

School administrator Yana Bland says that Roper -- the part-time art and journalism teacher who had conceptualized the mural -- refused to cooperate with the school board's request that he paint over parts of his students' work, which also contained what Bland and others in the school's administration called "violent" and "Satanic" images. "Most of the staff felt that the process involved in putting the mural up was inappropriate and that as a whole it was not aesthetic," Bland says. "I went to the board and the board was very unanimous in feeling it was inappropriate for the school."

Roper tells a different story. He contends that Bland, after vowing to support the students' mural, went back on her word when board members objected to imagery it contained, including a monster (which board members said was a representation of Satan) and an airplane, painted by Roper, shooting down a duck. "I was completely outraged," Roper says. "It was a question at that point of whether I wanted to continue working there." The image of the two men that originally bothered the board members, Roper insists, "was not sexual at all. If he had painted a cheerleader and a football player kissing they wouldn't have batted an eye."

Ultimately, Roper says, he was fired for not being a "team player." That meant, among other things, allowing one of his students to protest the board's decision to whitewash the mural by painting the First Amendment on a large piece of plywood and leaning it up against the now-blank wall. Bland counters that Roper lost his job because he failed to consult the school board and administration about the design of the mural, which was painted on a wall in a common area of the school.

Although Roper places much of the blame for his termination on Bland, others at the school say culpability rests on the board as a whole, which was reportedly concerned about what might happen if they allowed the mural to stand. Elizabeth Lee, a consultant for the school who took over Roper's art class after he was fired, says that although the board "handled the situation really badly" by painting over the mural without consulting the teachers and students beforehand, she believes Bland was "just trying to do what she could to keep the school from getting in trouble."

The Katherine Anne Porter School was founded by Bland and her husband, KAP board member David Bland, as an oasis for at-risk kids with nowhere else to go. Students at the free public school include kids who were formerly home-schooled; kids who dropped out of ordinary high schools because they felt they didn't fit in; and kids who, for one reason or another, need more one-on-one attention than ordinary public high schools can provide. Currently, according to Bland, the Porter school is at its maximum capacity of 115 students, with dozens more on a waiting list.

But the school is, Lee points out, an alternative charter school in a very conservative community. Moreover, she says, it's a charter school without the resources to fight an expensive court battle for students' right to artistic expression. "People [in Wimberley] are not very happy about the school being here, and some would just like to see it go away .... I'm glad [Roper] is pursuing this, but I would hate to see the school get shut down because of it."

Others say those fears are unfounded; the real problem, they insist, is that a conservative board bowed to the desires of a small but vocal faction of parents who insisted that a mural depicting homosexuality had no place in a public school. "They were apparently concerned about upholding community values," says Porter School parent Pat O'Bryan, who calls the board's decision to whitewash the mural "unbridled arrogance."

"They were really concerned about Satanism. ... The board is very conservative and representative of that part of the community that is not the artists and the writers."

Roper says he sent a packet of information on his story to the American Civil Liberties Union, and is still waiting to hear their opinion on the case.