Black Lives Matter flag will be raised Monday

On Monday afternoon at 1 p.m., Burlington High School will be raising the Black Lives Matter flag. It will remain there for the rest of the school year. The ceremony is closed to the public.

The Burlington School Board unanimously passed the resolution to raise the flag early last week. Students presented the board with a petition of more than 450 signatures.

"Black Lives Matter to me right now means being heard, being seen, being acknowledged, being here, " Burlington High Senior, Eliza Abedi said. "I just like I just feel like I'm finally being seen by everybody around me and being understood here and it feels great."

"The flag is just a symbol... the real work is inside the school," Burlington High Senior Hawa Adam said.

There are mixed feelings on this issue. Veronica Salber has a child at Burlington High School. Salber says she comes from a biracial family and experienced racism first hand while growing up in Philadelphia. She was a part of the Black Lives Movement in Philly but says it became too violent. Salber feels that raising the Black Lives Matter Flag promotes division, not equality.

"They are creating a divide and teaching a divide within a school system where we need to be teaching unity and love of each other and what this is really about," Salber said. "This concept that we have in the world today, it comes from a higher political thing and it's force fed into our faces to see race as two separate existences, and it is not two separate existences. We are one."

Salber's idea is for the school to have an art project to design a new flag that encompasses everybody. She plans to speak out about this idea at the next Burlington School Board meeting March 13.