STUDENT RIGHTS
TINKER v. DES MOINES SCHOOL DIST., 393 U.S. 503
(1969) is one of the most important U.S. Supreme Court
cases on student rights. The following language is from
the Supreme Court's opinion:
"First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years."
"The Fourteenth Amendment, as now applied to the States, protects the citizen against the State itself and all of its creatures - Boards of Education not excepted. These have, of course, important, delicate, and highly discretionary functions, but none that they may not perform within the limits of the Bill of Rights. That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes."
"The District Court concluded that the action of the school authorities was reasonable because it was based upon their fear of a disturbance from the wearing of the armbands. But, in our system, undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression. Any departure from absolute regimentation may cause trouble. Any variation from the majority's opinion may inspire fear. Any word spoken, in class, in the lunchroom, or on the campus, that deviates from the views of another person may start an argument or cause a disturbance. But our Constitution says we must take this risk, and our history says that it is this sort of hazardous freedom - this kind of openness - that is the basis of our national strength and of the independence and vigor of Americans"
"In order for the State in the person of school officials to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, it must be able to show that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint. Certainly where there is no finding and no showing that engaging in the forbidden conduct would "materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school," the prohibition cannot be sustained."
"In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are "persons" under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved. In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views. As Judge Gewin, speaking for the Fifth Circuit, said, school officials cannot suppress ‘expressions of feelings with which they do not wish to contend.’"
"`The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.' Shelton v. Tucker, [364 U.S. 479,] at 487. The classroom is peculiarly the `marketplace of ideas.' The Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth `out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.'"
The full Supreme Court opinion in the Tinker case is here: FindLaw: United States Case Law
Sites and articles on Student's Rights:
* Visit the ACLU Student Rights page. An excellent place for information.
And, see: http://www.aclu.org/students/, the ACLU National Campus Program.
* Also, be sure to visit the ACLU of Wisconsin Youth and Civil Liberties Project site. Excellent!! Go there!!
* School Dress Codes and Uniforms:
For information, go to:
http://www.tentler.com/dress.htm
Also, see these excellent sites and support these families in their struggle against school dress codes and for constitutional rights:
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/Uniform.html
For more School Dress Code Protest information:
http://www.tentler.com/DressPosts.htm
* For comments and general information on student rights, please see the Best Past Posts from the now discontinued Student Rights Forum.
* Violate school dress code, go to JAIL!!!!
A school Superintendent wants to seek CRIMINAL CHARGES against parents who send their children to school out of uniform!!! Read about this absurdity at
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/Uniform.html
More on student rights:
Some schools want students to learn about their Constitutional Rights; just don't try exercising them.
Here is an excellent article from freedomforum.org describing recent attacks on the First Amendment in high schools:
"Tough times at 'Free Speech High: School.' Administrators teaching dismal First Amendment lessons.By Paul McMasters First Amendment Ombudsman freedomforum.org
12.7.98For just a taste of the dismal state of free expression for the nation's young people, consider last week's story of the Phoenix high school student who tried to publish his own newspaper and wound up in the headlines himself.
When junior Ben Powers tried to distribute his independent newspaper at Central High School, school officials confiscated the copies. What's worse, the school's attorney warned the 17-year-old in a letter that he could face legal action.
Only after the story started getting prominent mention in the Phoenix media did school administrators start rethinking their actions. Eventually they decided that they would allow Ben Powers' newspaper on campus.
"Far from condemning this student, we should be impressed," Superintendent Rene X. Diaz said. "After all, he did what I hope we are teaching all of our students, and that is to use critical thinking and creative skills to constructively address issues of concern to them."
Superintendent Diaz is to be commended for those words, but it would have been a lot better if he and his subordinates had developed that insight a little earlier. An ideal time would have been before they confiscated Powers' newspapers the first time, back in October.
The suppression of student free-press rights should be an anomaly, but it is not. In fact, it is all too common. Here are just a few examples of what is going on in the nation's high schools:
In Tampa, Fla., a high school teacher was barred from discussing the Starr report in her class of 17 seniors and one junior, despite having gotten written permission from all of their parents.
In Denver, South High Principal Shawn Batterberry supported local police after they accosted two student journalists taking pictures of the aftermath of an altercation at the school, took their film away from them and exposed it.
In Blue Springs, Mo., students have filed a lawsuit against South High School claiming officials fired their adviser for refusing to censor stories that the officials didn't like.
At Mosely High School in Florida, a teacher who had advised the award-winning newspaper for eight years was fired because of the "negative" content of the paper.
In Los Altos High School in California, school officials ordered the removal of a front-page photo in the student newspaper because they thought it might provoke an adverse reaction from students at a rival school.
In Silver Springs, Nev., high school officials pulled a student literary magazine from store shelves and apologized for a poem that townspeople thought was too critical of the community.
In New York City, Stuyvesant High School officials shut down an award-winning newspaper after it published articles critical of teachers.
The list goes on and on. Since the Supreme Court's ruling in Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier a decade ago, many school officials have felt free to censor the student press — in newspapers, magazines, yearbooks, radio or television broadcasts.
But these attacks on the independence and integrity of the student press is just part of a larger picture in which high school students are only sort-of citizens when it comes to First Amendment rights. The suppression extends to all aspects of student expressive activities.
At the high school in Bellevue, Ohio, the play "Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down" was canceled only a few days before it was to go on because two of the topics it touches on are death and suicide.
In Rhode Island, a Westerly High School student has decided to go to court after he was suspended twice for wearing a White Zombie rock group T-shirt.
In Vernon, Conn., high school students presented a petition asking the town council to rescind a curfew law. Instead, the town council voted to extend the law for another year.
In Van Buren, Mich., when students in advanced-placement biology and ecology classes opened their new textbooks this fall, they found that all the pages headed "abortions and pregnancies" had been ripped out by school officials.
In St. Louis, school officials yanked the 1960s Jefferson Airplane hit "White Rabbit" from the marching band's half-time routine because the song's lyrics referred to drugs, even though the song wasn't being sung.
Last spring, the valedictorian at Musselman High School in West Virginia was told by the principal that he could not make his speech because he was saying that sports was more valued than academics.
In Fall Brook, Calif., a sophomore was punished for remaining seated during the Pledge of Allegiance, despite numerous court rulings that it is the First Amendment right of a student not to be compelled to stand.
And in Marble Hill, Mo., a student was disciplined for insulting teachers and administrators on a personal Web site that he put out on his home computer.
This list, too, could go on and on. As chilling as these examples are, they are just a glimpse of what goes on in the nation's high schools day after day, year after year. Only some of these incidents are reported. Many times they go without notice or without challenge by students too busy or too intimidated to stand up for their own or fellow students' rights.
Literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these incidents happen every school year. A student, a class, or even a whole school is stripped of fundamental freedoms by a school official more concerned with asserting firm control than teaching good citizenship. Schools should prepare students for citizenship and empower them with the rights that must precede responsibility. Instead, school officials, by their actions, are teaching a cramped and distorted understanding of our First Amendment heritage.
Of course, we must appreciate the responsibility that teachers and administrators have for creating and maintaining a safe and orderly learning environment in their schools, as well as understand the difficulties in achieving that goal. We also must insist that it is possible — perhaps not easy, but possible — to create a good learning environment and still respect First Amendment rights and values regarding students...
Every time such an incident occurs, it reverberates throughout the school, into the community, and into the future. When what our young people see contradicts what their teachers and textbooks say, the civics lesson learned makes a mockery of the fundamental freedoms that we as a nation celebrate."
In Florida, high school students were JAILED and expelled from school for exercising their First Amendment Rights by publishing a pamphlet of their writing!!! Here’s the story :
Los Angeles Times April 6, 1998
Students Give, Get Lesson in First Amendment Protections Ist Amendment Protections
By Mike Clary Times Staff Writer
MIAMI--The 20-page handwritten pamphlet was crude, offensive and in poor taste. Everyone, including the high school students who wrote it, agree on that.Not only was the underground publication rife with profanity and racial epithets, but the principal, Timothy Dawson, was depicted engaging in a sex act. Moreover, one essayist mused, "I often have wondered what would happen if I shot Dawson in the head." But did that constitute a threat on the principal's life? Should the students--five girls and four boys--have been charged with hate crimes, arrested and jailed? And just what are the free-speech rights of children in public schools?
Those questions still reverberate in Miami, six weeks after the Killian High School students who wrote "First Amendment" spent the night in jail, were suspended and later expelled.
Both the contents of the pamphlet and the punishment meted out continue to fuel lively debate here, especially after a local weekly paper, New Times, reprinted "First Amendment" under the headline: "Why are we showing you the contents of the Killian High pamphlet? Because we can!"
Constitutional scholar Donald M. Jones, a law professor at the University of Miami, said the flap over the publication shows that "we still have a vast reservoir of immaturity when it comes to discussions of race and free speech." Jones said jailing the students was indefensible. "We can't prevent people from thinking in ways that are prejudiced and hateful," Jones said. "There shouldn't be thought crimes in 1998." Indeed, officials refused to prosecute the students, saying the 1945 Florida law under which they were charged is "unconstitutional and unenforceable." But state Atty. Katherine Fernandez Bundle did comment
that she found the pamphlet contained "language and drawings of an outrageous and highly offensive nature."
The arrests and expulsions have alarmed civil libertarians. "This is an extreme overreaction. I've never heard of high school students being jailed for distributing a pamphlet," said Mark Goodman, an attorney and executive director of the Student Press Law Center, a Washington-based group that provides legal advice to student publications. "There is no question this is material many people would be offended by. But a threat? You have to look at who these students are."
Seven of the so-called Killian Nine are being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has vowed to sue the school system for false arrest. "What is going on around the country is a tendency to think that kids don't have rights, or have fewer rights," said Howard Simon executive director of the ACLU's Florida chapter. "But the Ist Amendment does not stop at the schoolhouse door."
Killian, with an enrollment of 4,000, is considered one of the top high schools in South Florida. All of the students involved in producing "First Amendment" were members of the school's art club, and several were on the honor roll. One of the Killian Nine, 18-year-old David Morales, said he and the others have apologized for the pamphlet and added that they had no malicious intent. "Anybody with an IQ over 5 could see the pamphlet was a satire," Morales told the Miami Herald. But neither Dawson nor school administrators saw it that way. After being provided the names of the Killian Nine, Dawson called school police and had them arrested, saying: "They have threatened to kill me."
And school system administrators have taken a hard line. "This is racial, profane, obscene," commented Deputy Supt. Henry Fraind. ''Does that bother anyone except us?" About 2,500 copies of "First Amendment" were printed, but it is unclear how many were distributed.
"The pamphlet ran the gamut of expression, from painful efforts at self-examination to romantic poetry to blunt criticism of school policies," said New Times Editor Jim Mullin. "And much of it was admirable for its literary ambition. Yes, there was some obscenity, and the principal took his share of hits. But death threats? Get real."
THESE STUDENTS DESERVE THE SUPPORT OF EVERYONE WHO CARES ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION!!!
Some schools are trying to control and punish students for what they write on the web.
This article was in the New York Times on March 8, 1998:
Schools Challenge Students' Internet Talk
By Tamar Lewin
"Aaron Smith's troubles grew out of a drawing that he made in the school computer lab, one that his friend said looked like a chihuahua being killed. That remark, hilarious to a group of 13-year-old boys, became a kind of standing joke that led Aaron and his computer-nerd pals to go home and create a "CHOW" Web page — a place for Chihuahua Haters of the World to share tidbits like the tale of the 7-foot boa constrictor that ate a chihuahua.
"The whole CHOW Web page was just for fun, but it was my creation and I loved it," said Aaron, whose site included a statement that he and his friends did not imagine how it would evolve "when we started this in the Dowell Middle Schoolcomputer lab in McKinney, Texas."
But it was not hilarious to a Fort Worth, Texas, chow breeder who visited the page and became so incensed that she contacted the school, threatening an animal-rights protest.
"I must have gotten 50 e-mails," said the superintendent, Jack Cockrill. "We believed it was a product of the computer lab and we immediately began an investigation."
Hauled into the principal's office, Aaron quickly volunteered to take out the reference to the school. But that was not enough. School officials suspended him for the day, transferred him out of his favorite class — the computer lab where he was an aide — and told him to take down the Web site and post an apology.
Much like the underground newspapers of past generations, student-created Web pages are increasingly creating conflicts between students and schools, with students asserting their right to free speech on their personal sites while schools seek to control content that concerns them.
"As more and more people get online and more out-of-school online conduct gets tracked back to the school, we're seeing more of these cases," said Ann Beeson, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. "Schools are trying to control what kids write online or punish them for it, when they have no right to."
Beeson said the first such case that came to her attention occurred several years ago in Bellevue, Wash., where a bright high school senior, Paul Kim, created a Web site, on his own time, that was a parody of the high school newspaper.
School officials told him they did not like the parody, Beeson said, but they did not tell him that because of it they were withdrawing his recommendation for a National Merit Scholarship. With legal help from the ACLU, the boy won a "very favorable settlement," Beeson said.
In Aaron's case, too, the civil liberties organization has reached a settlement, under which he was allowed to return to the computer class, with no mention of the Web-page incident to appear on his record.
"This was a bizarre intrusion on his free-speech rights," Beeson said. "It was a Web site created off
campus, completely unrelated to school, and he has every right to announce to the world that he goes to
that school. It doesn't give the school any right to exert any power over his Web page."
Beeson is still negotiating with Geocities, the Web server that had carried the chihuahua site but took it down after Aaron posted his apology, apparently because the way the apology was posted created a technical violation of Geocities guidelines.
And Aaron is still hoping to get the CHOW site going again, with missives like this boa story from Aug. 11:
"Today in the California region a 7-ft. boa constrictor was caught devouring a chihuahua. I have repeatedly called the snake's home to tell him what a great job our operatives are doing out there, but he won't answer the phone. If anyone can relay this information to him CHOW would be grateful."
If schools worry about that kind of silliness, they become absolutely enraged about sites created specifically as forums to criticize school policies or personnel.
One of the knottiest cases arose in December in Statesboro, Ga., where a 15-year-old student was arrested and charged with making terroristic threats against the principal of Statesboro High School, Darryl Dean, and his family, on a Web site that caused concern from the start.
It was not a pleasant site, laced with obscenity and invitations to click on links to other sites, where browsers could find out about "cool bands, how to make bombs and even how to kill yourself."
And it promised trouble to Dean, 36, in his first year as principal, with suggestions for shooting him, kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter, scratching his car with keys and putting Superglue in the locks at school. Other students posted their critiques of the principal and the school, often in the crudest language they could muster.
The school came down hard: The district not only suspended the creator of the site but also turned over the case to the police for criminal investigation. The boy's name was not released, because the charges, still pending, are in juvenile court.
The school also suspended several students who had posted negative comments. Although the suspensions have all been completed, some of the students are seeking to have their disciplinary records expunged.
Civil libertarians contend that the school wrongly punished the students. "Our position is that the school system cannot discipline students for off-campus free-speech activity," said Gerald Weber, legal director of the Georgia Civil Liberties Union. "You can't stop students or anyone else from saying what they want unless there's a credible threat of imminent harm. It was a complete overreaction to suggest that this was a real threat. It was all hyperbole, not a realistic threat."
Louisa Abbot, a lawyer for one of the suspended students, said the school should not have treated the Web site as a real threat.
"These are not students who have been a problem in school, and they were just expressing the kind of dislike of authority that every generation feels," Abbot said. "It's interesting to speculate whether, if there'd been a more temperate use of language, this would have provoked such an extreme reaction."
Both Dean and the lawyer for the school board, Vanderver Pool, declined to discuss the case, citing student confidentiality.
The boy charged with the threats, who is generally described as well behaved, also declined to discuss the case, saying he hoped that the charges would "blow over." So did his lawyer, Gates Peed.
People familiar with the case said the charges might have been as much a matter of timing as of any real perception of a threat. The Statesboro boy's arrest followed closely on the heels of national publicity about a 14-year-old in West Paducah, Ky., who fired on classmates at a prayer circle, killing three girls and injuring five others.
In that climate, the people in Statesboro said, school authorities might have felt that they could not afford to ignore anything that might be a harbinger of violence."
Academic Freedom
A high school teacher helped her students put on a school play that won many awards. Then she was denounced by a few school officials and members of the community for staging "dirty plays" and was punished by being transferred to a middle school. Now she is fighting for freedom of speech and academic freedom in high schools.
Everyone should support this brave teacher.
Read about it in this Los Angeles Times article:
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, May 13, 1998
Final Legal Exam Sought for Idea of Academic Freedom
Law: Teacher who staged controversial play and lost her position is appealing to U.S. Supreme Court
By DAVID G. SAVAGE, Times Staff Writer
Teacher, Peggy Boring had compiled a winning record at the regional and state competitions that would have made her a local legend had football or basketball been her field.
In the 1992 regional competition, for example, she and her cast of four young actresses swept up 17 of 21 possible awards for their performance of playwright Lee Blessing's "Independence." And they placed second in the state finals.
But none of this protected her when the Asheville community discovered that "Independence" is about a single mother's effort to hold on to her three grown but troubled daughters, one of whom is a lesbian. Denounced for staging "dirty plays," Boring was transferred to a middle school.
Now her fight to get back her job may answer a fundamental issue of law: Do teachers, while they are in the classroom, have constitutional rights of free speech and academic freedom?
In February, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., threw out her lawsuit on a 7-6 vote and characterized "academic freedom" in high schools as something of a dangerous constitutional myth left over from the 1960s. In public schools, the court stressed, elected school boards control the curriculum--and that involves everything in learning, including the school newspaper, library books and dramatic presentations.
But if there is no academic freedom, Boring and her legal allies warn, teachers will be vulnerable to retaliation by community activists who are upset by reports of classroom conduct that they deem objectionable. "I decided to see this through because embattled teachers deserve some protection," said Boring, 55.
Group of Prominent Ministers Complains
She plans to appeal her case to the Supreme Court today, although the justices will probably not decide until the fall whether to hear it.
Ironically, "Independence," the play that cost Boring her high school job, was produced for interscholastic competition. It was not intended to be performed at her school, the Charles D. Owen High School in Asheville.
But a portion of "Independence" was staged during a special English class. A student described the scene to her parents, who protested to the principal. Boring's notoriety spread, and before long a group of prominent ministers complained that she had brought foul language as well as "blasphemy, premarital sex, homosexuality and promiscuity" into the high school.
Frank Yeager, the county schools superintendent, ordered her transferred to the middle school. "The people I heard from were upset with me for not firing her," said Yeager, who since has retired.
"There was a pretty strong feeling [that] this sort of thing should not happen in public school."
Believing she had been pushed out of her job unfairly, Boring was convinced that her drama deserved a second act--with a happier ending. She filed suit contending that the school board had violated her 1st Amendment right to free speech and academic freedom by punishing her over the controversial content of an advanced theater production.
Principal Reportedly Told in Advance
Teachers should not be punished, her lawyers argued, just because of the ideas or behavior of the characters in students' assigned reading. Boring pointed out that she had told the principal of the play, given him a copy of the script and invited him to attend a performance. He paid no heed until the parents protested.
Act II also had a bad ending for Boring, however, and it carried a far wider message. The influential and conservative U.S. 4th Circuit
Court of Appeals said that teachers have no rights to free speech and academic freedom. Judge H. Emory Widener Jr., writing for the court, called her case "nothing more than an ordinary employment dispute. That being so, the plaintiff has no 1st Amendment rights derived from her selection of the play." In the public schools, Widener held, elected school boards control the curriculum.
"We agree with Plato and [English philosopher Edmund] Burke and
Justice [Felix] Frankfurter that the school, not the teacher, has the right to fix the curriculum," the judge wrote. Teachers who overstep these bounds--even when the boundaries are not made clear in advance--cannot turn to the courts for legal protection, the appellate majority added.
The outcome starkly illustrates a trend that troubles teachers, their lawyers and some 1st Amendment advocates.
On the one hand, community activists on the right and left are becoming quicker to protest developments in the classroom that
offend them. For Christian conservatives, the offense often involves matters of foul language, sex or homosexuality. Protests from the left are triggered by incidents involving alleged racism or sexism.
Often, individual teachers are targeted. And at the same time, the more conservative courts have made clear that they will not protect a teacher who comes under fire.
"This is a potentially dangerous decision in this climate," Elliot
Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way, said of the North Carolina case. "We are seeing more incidents where teachers are targeted, and this decision puts them at significant risk.
It says school boards have absolute carte blanche to discipline them over curriculum decisions which someone later disagrees with."
The ruling also perturbed lawyers at the National Education Assn., the huge teachers' union.
"This was not about the curriculum or even about whether this play was appropriate or inappropriate," said Michael Simpson, the NEA's assistant general counsel. "This was about a school board covering its behind because [it was] getting pressure from Christian conservatives."
6 Judges Call Teacher 'Scapegoat'
The six dissenting judges on the appeals court agreed, saying that school officials in Asheville had made Boring "a scapegoat" and used her to shield them.
"This is a case about a dedicated teacher who in no way violated any aspect of the approved curriculum, who followed every previously required standard set forth for the selection and approval of school productions and who, when requested to do so, redacted certain portions of the production," wrote Judge Clyde Hamilton.
The teacher, "nevertheless, lost her position as a result of the production, all for the sole purpose of shielding the principal and board from the wrath of the public outcry." Boring said she was surprised that the appeals court regarded her case as one involving control of the curriculum. "I wasn't trying to wrest the curriculum from anyone," she said. "I was trying to provide an educational experience for an advanced theater group."
Her appeal to the Supreme Court--the case is called Boring vs. Buncombe County Board of Education (a name Charles Dickens might have invented)--focuses instead on teachers' rights of free speech and academic freedom in the classroom.
Courts Divided Over Free Speech in School
Teachers have the same free-speech rights as other citizens to speak out on matters of public concern, or even to write letters to local newspapers criticizing their school boards. But the lower courts are divided over whether these general rights extend into school.
On a rhetorical level, "academic freedom" lives on through some glowing passages in the Supreme Court opinions of the 1960s.
Boring's lawsuit quotes all of them.
"Academic freedom [is] a transcendent value to all of us [and] a special concern of the 1st Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom," wrote Justice William J. Brennan in 1967. "The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools."
The high court's decision in that case upheld the free-speech right of Harry Keyishian, an English professor at a state college in Buffalo, N.Y., who had challenged the state law that required teachers to sign loyalty oaths and disavow a belief in communism.
Two years later, during the Vietnam War, the high court sided with high school students who wore black armbands to class as a protest. "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate," wrote Justice Abe Fortas in the case of Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent School District.
By the 1980s, however, the Supreme Court had backed away from those broad pronouncements without ever specifically overruling the earlier decisions.
In 1986, for example, the court upheld a high school principal's decision to discipline a student leader for including a sexual innuendo in a speech to an assembly. The student's speech must bow to the demands of preserving order and civility at school, the court said in Bethel School District vs. Fraser.
Two years later, the justices said that the student editors of a school newspaper do not have a free-speech right to choose the articles.
The decision, in Hazelwood School District vs. Kuhlmeier, said that the school paper was part of the curriculum and it upheld a principal's last-minute move to excise two articles on teen pregnancy.
In the decade since, that decision has been applied regularly against teachers. The Richmond appeals court relied on it directly in the ruling against Boring.
School Officials' Authority Upheld
The Supreme Court's opinion confirmed "educators' authority over school-sponsored publications, theatrical productions and other expressive activities . . . that may be characterized as part of the curriculum," Judge Widener wrote for the appeals court. School officials, not teachers, have the exclusive power to decide the curriculum, he concluded.
Gwendolyn Gregory, a veteran attorney for the National School Boards Assn., said that the appeals court was right, even if its decision seems unfair in Boring's case.
"I envy those kids. I was a theater student in high school and would have loved to have this teacher," she said. "But you can't run a school if the teachers have a right to go to court and second-guess decisions about the curriculum. We say it is an absolute right of the school board and the administrators to make those decisions.
"This issue has been popping all around the country," she added, although teachers' claims have rarely been as attractive as Boring's.
Among those asserting their free-speech rights have been teachers who have made racist comments, used gutter language or made remarks characterized as sexually harassing.
"The term 'academic freedom' still gets thrown around a lot but I don't think there is any such right in a legal sense," Gregory said.
Teachers are not claiming a right to control the curriculum, countered Jeremiah Collins, a lawyer working on Boring's appeal.
Had the principal said that the teacher could not use the play for her drama class, she would have no right to disagree, he said. "But this case goes much further. This says anything you say or do in the classroom can be grounds for firing you or disciplining you," Collins said.
Elizabeth Carpenter, the student actress who played the key role in the original drama, said that she is still taken aback by the controversy that engulfed her teacher.
"There was a lesbian character on stage. That was all. That might seem like a minor thing but, in a small mountain community, that was enough to throw up a red flag," said Carpenter, who now works at the Seattle Repertory Theater.
She praised Boring as "a great teacher who changed my life. My parents didn't have a lot of money and she got me on the track to get a scholarship and an apprenticeship in the theater."
'Why Do They Hate You, Grandma?'
Regardless of the outcome in the Supreme Court, the case already has had something of a happy ending for Boring.
She decided last year to leave the Asheville area and put the controversy behind her.
"I think the final straw," she said, "was having my grandchild come home from first grade and ask me: 'Why do they hate you, Grandma?' "
Soon after, she was offered a position as the drama teacher at a new arts magnet school in Charlotte.
"It was a painful route to get here," Boring said, "but this is heaven for me." Copyright Los Angeles TimesEveryone who cares about the Constitution should support this brave teacher.
Thanks for visiting.