Principal Forced to Quit After Parents Complained ‘David’ Statue Shown in Art Class Was Porn

The principal of a “classical” charter school in Florida was forced to resign last week because of an art class where sixth grade students were shown one of the most recognizable works of art in history. 

Tallahassee Classical School principal Hope Carrasquilla submitted her resignation from the publicly-funded charter school on March 20, after the school’s board demanded she step down following complaints from parents of sixth graders about a lesson that included Michaelangelo’s “David” statue, the Tallahassee Democrat reported last week. 

One parent reportedly said that the statue—a nude depiction of the Biblical figure David—was “pornographic,” while two other parents said they wished they’d been notified about the lesson beforehand, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. 

The chair of the school’s board, Barney Bishop III, said in an interview last week that the school had sent out an “advance notice” to parents about the lesson in previous years, and that not doing so this year was an “egregious mistake.” Bishop told Slate that he told Carrasquilla she could either voluntarily resign or he would ask the school board to terminate her without cause. 

“98 percent of the parents didn’t have a problem with [the lesson],” Bishop told Slate. “But that doesn’t matter, because we didn’t follow a practice.” 

Under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has been a leading booster of the “parents’ rights” movement, with new laws banning classroom discussions of gender and sexuality, as well as bans on teaching critical race theory. This year, some public school teachers in Florida have gone so far as to remove their classroom libraries to avoid potential prosecution. 

Tallahassee Classical School follows the “Hillsdale 1776 curriculum” developed by the conservative Hillsdale College. DeSantis officials have said they want Hillsdale to be the model for their rebrand of New College of Florida, the public liberal arts honors college in Sarasota, which was recently taken over by right-wing DeSantis appointees to the school’s board who fired the president and closed the school’s Office of Inclusive Excellence.  

“Parents are the ones who are going to drive the education system here in Florida. The governor said that, and we’re with the governor,” Bishop told Slate. “Parents choose this school because they want a certain kind of education. We’re not gonna have courses from the College Board. We’re not gonna teach 1619 or CRT crap… The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids.” 

Carrasquilla said in a statement last week that Bishop “was more concerned about litigation and appeasing a small minority of parents, rather than trusting my expertise as an educator for more than 25 years.”

Carrasquilla’s story spread around the globe over the weekend, including to Italy. The mayor of Florence tweeted about it Saturday, calling the conflation of the statue with pornography “ridiculous.” The Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, where the statue is on display, has invited Tallahassee Classical School parents and students to see the statue in person, the AP reported Sunday. 

“To think that David could be pornographic means truly not understanding the contents of the Bible, not understanding Western culture and not understanding Renaissance art,” the museum’s director, Cecile Hollberg, told the AP. 

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