Inset: Sarah Inama (Idaho Education News). Background: The Idaho school where social studies teacher Sarah Inama hung up her “Everyone is Welcome here” poster that was banned by district officials (Google Maps).
Idaho school officials issued an “unconstitutional” ban on a teacher“s “Everyone is Welcome Here” poster that she hung in her classroom, which was labeled “political resistance” to the “rise of President Donald Trump” and “not something that everyone believed,” the educator says in a lawsuit.
“Not everyone agrees that ‘everyone is welcome,’ so it is a political opinion,” claimed West Ada School District administrators in an explanation to Lewis & Clark Middle School social studies teacher Sarah Inama as to why she couldn’t hang her poster and others like it, according to a federal complaint that she filed in the District of Idaho.
“The color of the hands is crossing the political boundary,” the administrators allegedly told Inama, in reference to her poster featuring hands from people of different races.
“They express an opinion that not everyone agrees with,” said Lewis & Clark principal Monty Hyde during a February 2025 conversation with Inama in her classroom, according to her complaint. Hyde allegedly noted that this was “the way things are now” after the Idaho Legislature introduced a bill that proposed outlawing “flags” or “banners” that expressed “ideological views” about race or politics.
The legislation, House Bill 41 (HB 41), was passed and signed into law in March 2025.
“Sounds racist to me,” Inama told Hyde and her school‘s vice principal, Heather Fisher, during their conversation in February 2025, according to the complaint. “Principal Hyde explained that the notion that ‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ was not something that everybody believed and was therefore a personal opinion in violation.”
The “Everyone is welcome here” poster that was banned after Sarah Inama hung it up in her classroom (Idaho Education News).
School officials deemed Inama’s poster as violating HB 41 after Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador defined “poster” as falling within the statutory definition of a “banner,” according to her complaint. He made the determination and then reiterated it in a June 2025 opinion filed with the state’s Department of Education.
Labrador concluded that the “Welcome Poster” and others like it in Inama’s classroom, including ones with rainbow colors, “‘cannot be displayed in Idaho schools’ because the posters ‘are part of an ideological/social movement which started in Twin Cities, Minnesota following the 2016 election of Donald Trump,'” according to Inama’s complaint.
Labrador later penned an op-ed for Fox News in July 2025 in which he said, “The rainbow colors and progressive symbols accompanying these messages make their political purpose unmistakable” and they “reflect a broader ecosystem of political resistance groups launched in protest of the political rise of President Donald Trump.”
Labrador added, “These seemingly neutral terms mask a comprehensive worldview that undermines parental authority over children’s moral development.”
Inama was a sixth-grade teacher at Lewis & Clark Middle School before she resigned in May 2025. She says that “no student ever complained” about her posters being “unwelcoming,” nor did parents.
In her initial responses to administrators, Inama said she felt it was “gross to say that we need to remove hands representing colors of all students in our school,” according to her complaint. She noted that she “doesn’t agree that the skin tone is a political message” and “doesn’t want to appease bigoted people.”
The complaint adds that Inama tried fighting the ban at first, stating that it was “important to her that she not crumble to something that feels racist.” But there was ultimately nothing she could do to persuade administrators.
“Ms. Inama now brings this lawsuit seeking declaratory and injunctive relief that the Speech Law [HB 41] is unconstitutionally vague and overbroad in violation of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment, is violative of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, both facially and as applied, and is a violation of the Constitution of the State of Idaho,” the complaint concludes.
Labrador, the Idaho State Board of Education and Idaho State Department of Education, the West Ada School District, its superintendent Derek Bub, and principal Hyde are all named as defendants in the 43-page document. They did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday by Law&Crime.
