WALPOLE, Mass. – Massachusetts’ Walpole School District recently decided to permanently block a citizen’s Confederate flag banner that overlooks a high school athletic field, but opted to keep the school’s Rebels moniker.

The Walpole School Committee voted unanimously Thursday to make permanent a 14-by-7-foot banner it erected during last year’s graduation ceremonies to block a neighbor’s large Confederate flag banner alongside Walpole High School’s Turco Field, the Boston Globe reports.

The Confederate banner was installed by 1969 Walpole High graduate Joseph Finneran, who attended shortly after the school transitioned from the Hilltoppers to the Rebels, and the school’s football team rallied around the Confederate flag.

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Finneran installed the display about five years ago to honor the Rebels football team and doesn’t plan on taking it down, WWLP reports.

A racially motivated church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina this summer that left nine blacks dead created hysteria over the Confederate flag, mostly because the alleged shooter, Dylann Roof, liked to pose with it and post the images to Facebook.

In the wake of the tragedy, and amid calls to remove all traces of the Old South from communities across the country, several locals pressured the school board to take action against Finneran’s flag.

The one thing they can’t do, however, is remove it.

“The high school has no authority to abridge a private citizen’s rights to fly that flag,” superintendent Lincoln Lynch III told the Globe. “Although it is frustrating and it does not represent our community, it is his right.”

Walpole grad and Brown University sophomore Matthew Brownsword wrote in to the Walpole Times newspaper condemning the image after a bad experience following a soccer game at the field.

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“In one game, we lost to a Milton team that had a couple of black players on the team. After the game, they stood under the flag and took a picture, exclaiming that they had beaten the ‘white racists from Walpole,’” he wrote, according to the Globe.

“I’m not racist. But what could I say to a kid that could point to a Confederate flag in the corner of the field as proof? Build something, anything, to block that flag. … Make something to shroud that symbol of hatred.”

At the school’s graduation ceremony this spring officials erected a banner with a large W to block the offending sign and initiated efforts to reconsider the school’s Rebels mascot. The school board heard from citizens on both sides of the debate, though it seems most hated the Confederate flag.

Many urged the board not to ditch the Rebels name.

“It’s a great honor to say I am a Walpole Rebel,” 1989 grad turned federal agent Joseph Parlon said. “I understand what the (Confederate flag) represents and the harm it instills, but I oppose changing the name Rebels.”

In the end, officials kept the Rebels name but decided to rebrand it somehow.

Lynch said “the Rebel name belongs to the community, but we have to disassociate it from anything that brings shame to our community.”

The board also voted to keep the large W banner to block Finneran’s flag in place, and to erect a second banner apologizing for the school’s neighbor, according to the Globe.

The message reads: “The Confederate flag is viewed as a divisive, hurtful, and offensive symbol by many people. The Walpole School Committee apologizes to anyone who may be offended by the private citizen who chooses to display a Confederate flag on private property in close proximity to the Walpole High School field. It does not in any way reflect values that we support and is not a symbol associated with or supported by Walpole Public Schools.”

Still, there’s some folks in Walpole that can’t let the issue go.

“To me, it looks like a Band-aid,” Stephanie Rodriguez Wilkes, a black mother of two Walpole students, told the Globe. “The question is, is that enough?”