Gwenie Lee

The U.S., Oregon, and POW MIA (Prisoner of War Missing In Action) flags fly on Lincoln’s tallest flagpole. Two flags have been put up on each of the smaller poles, featuring flags from various countries.

This year, in addition to a new field, the campus has new flags. There are seven flagpoles and each has room for three flags. Currently Lincoln High School has three flags flying on the tallest flagpole; the United States of America, POW MIA (Prisoner of War Missing In Action) and the Oregon flag. 

Two flags currently fly on each of the six smaller poles, including the flags of Canada, Somalia, United Nations, France, Morocco, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Italy, China, Ukraine and India. 

According to Lincoln Business Manager Jill Ross who received the shipment of flags, the hope is that throughout the year, flags  will be flown from countries all around the world.

“We actually have more flags than we can fit on the poles,” said Ross, “but our thought is we can trade off. We tried to get [flags that represent] people in the building that had connections to other countries too, and put those up.”

Ross hopes to involve students in choosing which flags to fly.

“I think we’ll always keep adding more flags. I think there’ll be new causes, new people, new reasons,” said Ross. “I anticipate that the student government [and] student leaders will come up to us and say ‘Hey, I think we should really fly this flag,’ and then we’ll be able to add that.”

 Sophomore Artina Bojnordi emphasized the importance of having flags that represent students’ values as well as backgrounds.

“I one hundred percent think that [having diverse flags] is such a good idea,” Bojnordi said. “I feel like especially taking into account that Lincoln is such a big school with such a big population of exchange students, we should start to include those flags so that they feel more welcome at Lincoln.”