The attorney general of Idaho issued an opinion telling schools not to allow teachers to post signs that say “Everyone is Welcome Here,” claiming that the message that public education is for everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or other categories is Democratic in nature and therefore illegally partisan.
“These signs are part of an ideological/social movement which started in Twin Cities, Minnesota, following the 2016 election,” Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador (R) said in guidance issued to a school. “Since that time, the signs have been used by the Democratic party as a political statement.”
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Labrador also noted that the state Democratic Party is selling signs that say “Everyone is Welcome Here,” but state Democrats say that they only started selling those signs at cost in order to draw attention to conservatives’ early attempts to ban them.
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The conflict centers on Idaho’s H.B. 41, which took effect last week and bans school employees from displaying flags or banners that show “opinions, emotions, beliefs or thoughts about politics, economics, society, faith or religion.”
Earlier this year, the state’s West Ada School District banned Sarah Inama, a teacher at Lewis and Clark Middle School, from displaying a sign that says, “Everyone is Welcome Here.” It showed a drawing of people’s hands with different skin tones, each with a heart on it.
The district also ordered her to take down another sign that read, “In this room everyone is welcome, important, accepted, respected, encouraged, valued, equal” on top of a background of rainbow colors. The rainbow colors included seven stripes, which differs from the six-striped rainbow Pride flag.
"I was told that 'everyone is welcome here' is not something that everybody believes. So that's what makes it a personal opinion," Inama said, attributing these statements to building administration and district personnel."https://t.co/ZBbN2ZO0wx
— Concerned Citizen (@CyDogood) March 13, 2025
The controversy over the signs garnered national headlines in March, and the state attorney general’s office looked into how the law would apply in such cases, issuing an opinion last week.
The attorney general determined that these specific signs would violate H.B. 41 and claimed that the statements in the signs are part of a political movement and not, as defenders of the signs argued, generally agreed-upon beliefs about the nature of public education.
Labrador’s guidance hyperlinked a 2017 news story about a group of women who protested racist graffiti that appeared at a local high school the day after the president was elected to his first term, according to the Idaho Capital-Sun, which posted the attorney general’s opinion. The women carried signs that read, “All are Welcome Here.”
The guidance then claimed that Inama started posting the “Everyone is Welcome Here” sign in 2017, “during the height of the above-referenced social movement.”
In March, Inama disagreed that the message is political or partisan.
“I don’t agree. I don’t agree that this is a personal opinion,” she told KTVB at the time. “I feel like this is the basis of public education.”
Inama resigned in May.
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