Ask senior Emyle Rogers about the First Amendment. A couple of weeks ago, she might have told you a story about her senior project, her crazy journalism teacher or her love for art. Today, she will tell you a new story – one about her life and a speech that made all of us look at those 42 words more closely than ever.

On Thursday, May 7, dancers, artists, and singers put on multiple performances for CAHS students, parents and faculty at the annual performing arts assembly. After a short introduction from speech and debate teacher Mr. Jonathan Sonoda, senior Emyle Rogers made her way onto the stage to deliver her award-winning speech.

Rogers’ speech was an adaption of the TED talk “Coming Out of Your Closet” by LGBTQ+ rights advocate, Ash Beckham. The topic of the speech dealt with having hard conversations and the universal use of “closets” as a way to hide from them.

Rogers talked about how a closet doesn’t necessarily have to be “the gay closet” and how everyone has their own closets, because “all a closet is, is a hard conversation.”

“Everyone has to deal with having hard conversations and it’s important for people to feel supported. Personally, the speech helped me through a lot of hard conversations and I wanted to share that with other people,” Rogers said.

Rogers had worked on the speech for the majority of the school year and received national recognition in February of this year. “[She worked on the speech for] hundreds of hours. Hundreds of hours with multiple people throughout the organization. She took fifth place at the Stanford Invitational, which hosted 221 schools including our own, and is, perhaps, the largest competition that our school has ever competed at. Technically speaking, she has, currently on our team, the highest honors,” Mr. Sonoda said.

Following her performance, Rogers received hugs, compliments and thank you’s for giving the speech and sharing the message with her peers. “I had people come up to me after my speech to tell me how it resonated with them and a couple even shared that it inspired them to have their own hard conversations,” Rogers said.

Despite the positive responses Rogers received from her peers and teachers, her speech triggered a heated community-wide discussion on free student speech in schools. Some students and parents expressed concern over the topics within Emyle’s speech and deemed them inappropriate for a school assembly.

“Anytime you say anything controversial, somebody is going to be upset and you are never going to make everyone happy … The bigger issue is can we embrace and accept other people’s’ viewpoints and lifestyles and choices even if they contradict ours and can we learn to not be offended by them?” English teacher Chalese Dunton said. “What Emyle did was present a point-of-view that some might not agree with but the message should not be lost even though there is differing opinions. The message was, ‘whatever your closet is, being comfortable enough with who you are.’ What’s unfortunate is that a lot of times we overlook the bigger message because we get hung up on being on the right side of an issue.”

The night following her speech, the student body and their families received an email titled “Special Announcement.” The email apologized for not warning the families about the content of Roger’s speech, which was labeled as an “incident” and stated that “the system [of communication] broke down” between the different levels of leadership.

Although it is a public school, the CAHS motto declares “Partnering with Parents” and prides itself on the joint effort between educators and parents in support of students.

“It’s not the first and it’s not the last that they’re going to hear something controversial or something different and new. It’s just about helping them understand what they’re hearing and what to do with that information so that they don’t just dismiss it or immediately move to offense but are able to take the information and engage in a productive thought process,” Dunton said.

The message also appeared on the Classical Academy High School’s Facebook page. In response to the email, many students and parents communicated their approval or disapproval of the apology on Facebook or emailed administration directly. Several students fired back on the social media site, which seemed to add more fuel to the fire.

“I don’t think administration should get involved with students on Facebook, and instead handle these kinds of issues via email. It’s far too casual and can lead to way too much miscommunication. The need for an apology was necessary and should have been sent to the entire school by email,” ASB member Max Burns said.

ASB has a strategic process for every assembly and knows what will be presented. For assemblies that cover sensitive or controversial topics, students and parents are informed and the study hall room is opened for those who wish to opt out. In the case of the assembly in question, the content of Rogers’ speech was not previously reviewed by the director or administration.

“I understand the need for why the administration might need to send [an apology] out, since parents were upset. But I think the whole process was rushed,” Burns said. “We as ASB have to know what we are doing at our assemblies so that people can be informed if the nature of the topic is sensitive. I understand that [Curry] was apologizing for the fact that parents and students didn’t know about the topic, but the phrasing wasn’t the best.”

The power of words seemed to trump good intention behind the message, a reminder that what we say and how we say it is constantly under scrutiny.

“Not only [did] I feel really protective over my friends, but I also felt betrayed in a way. I’m aware that most of the people [at CAHS] are [more] conservative so they may not agree with things like LGBTQ+ rights, but I feel like it was a really private and emotional thing that Emyle brought to the surface, only to have it be apologized about by the people in charge of the school. As a queer student, I felt threatened [by the apology]. It’s threatening to be a minority, and even more so when the people in charge basically revoke any support they claimed they had. The fact of the matter is, the writer of the letter turned something very positive and inclusive (everyone has closets) into something that needed to be apologized for. And that’s not okay. To make a change, we have to have courage, so I took my courage and wrote the most professionally angry letter I could,” senior Bianca Juarez said.

Rogers received multiple supportive messages from her peers, teachers, parents and others. “It was overwhelming how positive the reaction was to the speech and how supportive people were after the email was sent out,” Rogers said.

After receiving some backlash on social media and over email, Executive Director Cameron Curry sent an apology email to CAHS staff and apologized to individuals on Facebook for the miscommunication, as well as for sending the email under Mr. Moen’s name.

“From my vantage point it was never about the speech, it was all about a parent involvement piece … If anything, from a leadership perspective, it is really great for me to have individual conversations, not only through Facebook but in the hallway here, in different places in our community to say, ‘Let me correct the record,’ because it was my words that confused people and I deeply regret that,” Mr. Curry said.

By Monday, May 11, a sense of normalcy returned just in time for Rogers to begin the mural she’d been planning for months—a tribute to the First Amendment.

“Mrs. Shields came to me with the idea of painting the First Amendment on her wall the summer before my senior year. I decided to make that my senior project and worked with Mr. McGaugh to create an image to go with the amendment’s text,” Rogers said. “I worked on the mural during testing week not realizing that a mural that size would take a lot more time. I finally finished it after two and a half weeks of working on it. Seeing it transform from a small image I created on a computer screen to a giant 15 by 9 foot wall was such an amazing feeling.”

The Migrant Mother, MLK and a Baltimore rioter, among other famous pictures from history, run alongside the words of the First Amendment. The mural stands in the journalism room to remind, not only the journalism staff, but other students as well, of the the First Amendment’s importance.

“The First Amendment is such a vital part of our daily lives and I think students often forget that,” Rogers said.