PARK RAPIDS — The Park Rapids School Board voted unanimously to decline a donation that would display the Ten Commandments outside the newly landscaped Park Rapids High School next year.
The Park Rapids Enterprise reported that the Board based its Monday, June 3, decision on the mostly negative feedback on the proposed monument offered by former school board member Dennis Dodge.
Dodge’s monument proposal prompted a response from the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which warned the district that it would be open to litigation should it accept the monument.
Park Rapids High School is currently under renovation as part of a voter-approved referendum that passed in 2021, with landscaping expected to be completed by September 2025.
Itasca County recently painted over a Ten Commandments display at its new jail, and a decades-old Ten Commandments display at the Hibbing Courthouse was removed in 2018.
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