Parents and leadership at Washington, D.C.’s fanciest private girls’ school are flipping out that their kids are taking part in choir events for the inauguration as part of the Cathedral Choristers.
Washington National Cathedral has refused to bend to demands that its choristers, some of whom attend the private National Cathedral School (NCS), not participate in two events for the inauguration of Donald Trump.
To quell some of the hysteria, Elise Rabekoff, governing board chair of the NCS, sent out a statement Thursday on the matter to engage parents who have “passionate disagreement with the Cathedral’s decision.”
She explained that the Cathedral Choristers were invited to sing for the festivities surrounding the inauguration of Donald Trump. The program is run by the Washington National Cathedral, not the school itself, and parents sign an agreement with the Cathedral directly regarding participation in the choristers.
Still, Kathleen Jamieson, who serves as head of the school, pushed for the dean of the Cathedral and bishop of Washington Mariann Budde not to accept invites to sing at any inauguration events because “many in our community see it as in conflict with our school values of excellence, service, courage, and conscience.”
But the dean of the cathedral Randy Hollerith intends to go through with the events.
“I understand the strong disagreement many people have with the decisions to accept an invitation for the Cathedral choir to sing at the Inauguration and for the Cathedral to host the Inaugural Prayer Service,” Hollerith wrote. “I am sorry those decisions have caused such turmoil and pain. Yet I stand by those decisions — not because we are celebrating the President-elect, but because we want to model for him, and the rest of the country, an approach to civility.”
Given the amount of protest, students are now allowed to choose whether they want to participate in the choir performance or not, and yet that still didn’t satisfy 533 alumnae of the school, who believe that opting out is not a “meaningful option.”
“We hear a president-elect who has disparaging remarks about women about LGBT community, about people of color, and those are not values that we were taught as National Cathedral Students and those are not beliefs that were accepted by the Washington National Cathedral,” one NCS alumna, Ayoka Blandford, said.
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