LITTLEFIELD

PORTSMOUTH — “In the name of both freedom of speech and common sense,” the American Civil Liberties Union has asked Portsmouth High School principal Robert Littlefield to reconsider a decision to bar a senior yearbook photo showing a student dressed in a coat of mail with a reproduction of a medieval sword over his shoulder.

Without naming the student, Patrick Agin, Littlefield suggested last week that the photo would violate the school’s “zero tolerance” policy banning weaponry.

In a note to Patrick’s mother, Heidi Farrington, Littlefield has said Patrick may submit an alternate senior photo, or use the same photo if the family were to take out an ad in the back of the yearbook.

“It is easier for the school to disavow endorsement or approval of a photo when it is included in the advertising section,” Littlefield wrote in a note Farrington released yesterday. Efforts to reach Littlefield for additional comment were unsuccessful.

Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of the ACLU, wrote Littlefield on Farrington and Patrick’s behalf.

Mother and son both belong to the Society for Creative Anachronism, an international organization which reenacts medieval and Renaissance history.

“It is impossible to comprehend how this particular photograph of Patrick is an extraordinary danger to school values when it appears on one page of the yearbook with other student photos, but is unobjectionable when displayed a few pages later as a ‘recognition ad’,” Brown wrote.

If, as Littlefield has said, the “yearbook represents our school to a widespread audience for a long time to come,” Brown wrote, “by censoring Patrick’s photo, you are representing the school in a way that gives public schooling a bad name.”

Brown also said, “I feel confident in saying that no student of Portsmouth High School is going to construe Patrick’s picture as meaning that Portsmouth is lax in its view about weapons.

“I am sure that your school has done a better job teaching your students critical thinking than your statement suggests,” Brown said.

“Perhaps most distressing of all is that this incident arises in the same school district that put Julie Cahill through the same depressing cookie cutter only a few short years ago,” Brown wrote.

Julie Cahill, an honors student, was barred in the fall of 2001 from a program in which teens served as mentors to fourth graders in a drug abuse prevention program.

At the time, school officials said Cahill’s purple hair and nose ring distracted the elementary school students from the antidrug message.

In addition to her membership in the National Honor Society, Cahill was a former class president, belonged to the school band, drama club and Thespian Society, served as assistant editor of the school literary magazine, and taught religion classes to young children at her church.

An ACLU lawyer appealed unsuccessfully to the School Committee to rescind what Brown described at the time as a “new unwritten dress code” with prohibitions against “facial piercings or ‘abnormally colored’ hair.”

School officials, while acknowledging the unwritten code, also referred to a written policy that said students’ “appearance or mode of dress shall not, in the judgment of the principal, disrupt the educational process or constitute a threat to health or safety.”

In the latest case, “the incident only vividly demonstrates that public school ‘zero tolerance’ policies are popular because they eliminate the need to think,” Brown wrote.

“By failing to distinguish between a photograph of a student who enjoys medieval studies holding a prop broadsword and a photo of a juvenile delinquent holding an Uzi, the school has promoted a vacuous concept like zero tolerance into a policy that prefers rhetoric over reality and simple-mindedness over common sense,” Brown concluded.

Patrick’s mother, meanwhile, said she believes it is “discriminatory” for the school to allow the photo of her son carrying the reproduction sword only if she pays for an ad, which can run from about $50 to about $250, depending on size.

She said her son has his heart set on the existing photo and she does plan to take out an ad, but she does not know which size she will buy.