Jania Ashlynn
A school principal in Florida was asked to resign due to complaints from parents about their sixth-grade students seeing Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Biblical figure David in a lesson. After this, the principal decided to visit the famed artwork.
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Formal Complaints
“There is nothing wrong with the human body in and of itself,” Hope Carrasquilla, former Tallahassee Classical School principal, said in a statement.
Carrasquilla said that visiting the sculpture was like going to church. He mentioned its “purity” and “humanness.”
Cecilie Hollberg, the director of the Galleria, expressed her delight at showing Carrasquilla the artwork, which symbolizes the idea of good overcoming evil in a religious context.
She stated that it had no relation to pornography, which is different from what a parent from Tallahassee Classical School said according to HuffPost.
In March, Carrasquilla was requested to step down following an unexpected school board meeting, according to the Post. Despite not being informed of the rationale for the decision, she suggested it could have been due to an art class given to sixth graders about the marble statue of David in the nude.
“It is with a sad heart that my time as the principal of Tallahassee Classical School has come to an end,” Carrasquilla wrote in a letter to the school board.
Forwarded Letters
Carrasquilla expressed her surprise at the response of the school board and mentioned that the letter to parents was supposed to be sent before the lesson began. Unfortunately, there had been a miscommunication, and the letter was not sent.
Barney Bishop, chair of the school board, told the Post and local CBS station WCTV that Carrasquilla had been given the choice to resign or be dismissed due to issues related to the sculpture, though he emphasized the decision was mainly because of communication issues.
“She wasn’t let go because of the artistic nude pictures. We show it every year to our students,” Bishop shared, “The problem with this particular issue was the lack of follow-through on the process…Parental rights trump everything else.”
In a letter to the board, Carrasquilla asserted that she had “always desired good for Tallahassee Classical School” and that she was “not promoting myself or a political agenda,” the Post recounted.
