A Rhode Island high school student can use his senior portrait to express his interest in medieval history, the state Department of Education has ruled, finding that the photo does not conflict with the school's zero-tolerance weapons policy.

The principal of Portsmouth Public High invoked the policy in refusing to accept the photo, which depicts Patrick Agin dressed as a medieval knight and holding an imitation sword, for publication in the yearbook.

That decision was upheld by the school board, but never looked like surviving even the lowest, “rational basis” standard of judicial review. And so it turned out as hearing officer Paul E. Pontarelli ordered the board to publish the photo.

The weapons policy “obviously bears a rational relationship to legitimate pedagogical concerns,” he wrote in his opinion. “The problem ... is that the action taken by the [School] Committee does not bear a rational relationship to its stated objective.”

The ACLU had filed a First Amendment suit on Agin's behalf last month, but a federal judge referred the case to the education department.

At the hearing, Agin testified that he dressed as a knight because the “recreation of the medieval times” is one of his favorite hobbies and interests. “I really like this sort of thing and I wanted to be remembered as somebody who did,” he said.

Principal Robert Littlefield insisted that having “a student brandishing a weapon” in the yearbook would not be “consistent with our existing policies.” But Pontarelli seized on the fact that Littlefield had told Agin's mother she could pay to put the photo in the book's advertising section.

“To selectively apply the full force of a policy to one section of the yearbook, while ignoring another section of the yearbook, is arbitrary and capricious,” he concluded, and

[G]iven the context and circumstances of [Agin's] photographic historical representation of himself as a medieval figure, his photograph does not conflict with the School Committee's zero-tolerance weapons policy.

Agin prevailed even though Pontarelli held that the yearbook was not a public forum to which the highest level of review -– strict scrutiny –- applies. Because production of the yearbook was part of the school curriculum and a supervised classroom activity, he said, officials could regulate its contents “in any reasonable manner.”

A hearing in federal court on Agin's motion for a preliminary injunction is set for Feb. 5. But school officials should bow to the inevitable and accept the yearbook photo without wasting any more taxpayer dollars on legal proceedings.