A group of seven congregants from Topeka, Kan., set up outside Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., yesterday to protest the sexual orientation of the poet for whom the school was named.

The police presence - 40 officers, five horses, blocked-off streets and a football field's length of yellow tape - seemed comically disproportionate until the counter-protest arrived.

At 2:10 p.m. dismissal, 500 students issued forth from the campus and lined up, several students deep, along the police tape. They alternately chanted the school name and "Go home!" drowning out voices from across the street.

Whitman, a 19th-century poet with major influence on American literature, is generally regarded as gay, but his sexual identity remains enigmatic.

The Westboro Baptist Church has gained national notoriety for its anti-homosexuality demonstrations, staged provocatively outside military funerals. Yesterday, before heading to Whitman, they showed up at the funeral of the Middletown, Md., family that perished in a murder-suicide last week, claiming that those deaths, like the military casualties, were God's wrath toward a godless people. The police asked them to leave.

But at Whitman, the protesters arrived to palpable excitement. Faculty had spun the event into an interdisciplinary lesson. English teachers spent the day teaching Whitman's verse. Social studies teachers led a unit on tolerance. Math teachers fanned through the crowd, attempting a head count.

Students wore blue T-shirts emblazoned with the Whitman passage, "Let your soul stand cool and composed." Principal Alan Goodwin helped choose the slogan and hoped students would see its wisdom.

Indeed, no one was injured, and no property damaged. Rebekah Phelps-Davis, daughter of Westboro pastor Fred Phelps, said it was "the duty of the servants of God to go where the message needs to be heard."

Susan Russell, 17, a junior, said she hoped publicity stirred by the protest would "highlight how ridiculous they are. I mean, that sign - 'You will eat your babies' - that doesn't even mean anything."