This past weekend, more than 200 parents and students of Dwyer Middle School in Huntington Beach, Calif., protested the construction of a 615 kilowatt solar array on the school’s front lawn. The students of the school, whose athletes are known as the “Junior Oilers”, protested that the array should be located elsewhere on the campus, in a less visible location.

In a prepared speech, student Caroline Wiederkehr said, “We are pro solar. We just do not want the solar panels in this location on the grass in front of the school. Putting them in the grass where students hold their graduation and participate in P.E. [i.e., physical education] is just not right.”

Although the face of the protest was the students, Huntington Beach School District Assistant Superintendent for Administrative Services Jon Archibald said their parents were largely behind the protests.

“They were already upset before. It’s more the parents that have been upset—the parents that are upset because of where the panels are placed,” he said.

The array in question is being built on the school’s front lawn by Chevron Energy Solutions, a division of Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX). The parents and students contend that the array would take valuable recreation and physical education space on the school’s lawn and that it detracts from the historical building’s look.

The main part of the school was built in 1933, explained Archibald. He said the school and Chevron did evaluations of other locations for the array, but found that the lawn was the most appropriate area. For instance, they considered the roof, but that was problematic.

“The building hasn’t been seismically upgraded. And it’s difficult to fit that many panels on the roof,” he said.

Locating the panels on other parts of the school would have meant taking away other things, like basketball courts.

“This is a small site, it’s the most efficient spot,” he said. “It just wasn’t practical elsewhere.”

Moving the panels, he said, would have put the array further from the source, adding to the system costs.

The array will also include physical education aspects and handicapped accessibility.

“In fact in one of the areas, the physical education teachers are going to use it,” he said. “It allows the physical education department to offer a class outside—we don’t have a gym [at the school].”

The students organized for a month to protest the solar installation, and upon learning that they needed a permit to have the protest on school ground, their parents requested the permits a few days before the scheduled protest but didn’t receive them. They were contacted by the police and told they could face arrest if they protested on the school’s campus without appropriate permits, said Gloria Allred, a civil rights lawyer who came to the protest at the behest of Wiederkehr.

In a statement, she said she went to the protest to educate the students about their rights to free speech.

Ultimately no one was arrested at the protest, and construction is moving forward.

“We’re still moving ahead. All the materials have been ordered for it. The bases have been poured, the rest of the structure is arriving,” said Archibald.

He said the structure of the array should be completed within two weeks, and the panels will be installed afterward.

Pictured: A mockup of the project excerpted from the document "Huntington Beach City School District Chevron Energy Efficiency Projects Project Timeline"