B.B.* was introduced to the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in her first-grade class in California, during a lesson about Martin Luther King, Jr. Hearing the phrase, she felt empathy for her friend and classmate who is black. So, B.B. drew a picture of them and two other friends and wrote “Black Lives Mater (sic)” across the top.
Below, she added “any life” and handed the picture to her friend.
Little did she know her caring gesture would prompt a shocking overreaction from the school and a dangerous legal precedent that leaves children completely stripped of constitutional rights.
When B.B.’s classmate took the drawing home, her mother contacted the school, concerned that her daughter was being singled out for her race. In response, the school principal forced B.B. to apologize to her friend, banned her from drawing at school, and banned her from recess for two weeks.
B.B. received no explanation of her supposed wrongdoing, and the friend for whom she drew the picture was puzzled by her apology. Not only was B.B. confused, the school never informed B.B.’s parents. They only learned of the situation a year later through another parent.
The school’s massive overreaction to a young child’s innocent drawing reflects a worrying trend of race obsession in public education that’s contrary to fostering a truly inclusive school environment that values each student as an individual.
To punish a first-grader for giving an innocuous drawing to a classmate that neither disrupted the school nor offended the classmate simply because of an imagined association of the drawing with alleged racist intent shows how deep the ideology of race essentialism has permeated. It didn’t matter that B.B.’s intentions were laudable; the school punished her for saying things that someone else might find offensive.
But when B.B.’s mother filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the school district, the federal district court upheld the school’s actions. The court reasoned that, in the classroom, elementary school students simply have no First Amendment rights.
An elementary school is not a totalitarian environment in which students have no rights. The district court was wrong to claim otherwise and set a dangerous precedent, totally stripping elementary school students of their First Amendment rights.
Represented by Pacific Legal Foundation at no charge, B.B. and her mother are fighting back. They’ve asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the absurd lower court ruling and restore the free speech rights of all students, including first-graders.
*Our client is a minor and is using the pseudonym B.B. for privacy.
What’s At Stake?
- It is unconscionable for an elementary school to severely punish a first-grader based on an innocent drawing. And the district court was egregiously wrong to hold that elementary school students do not have First Amendment rights in school. First-graders have free speech rights like every American.
- The school’s massive overreaction to a young child’s innocent drawing reflects a worrying trend of race obsession in public education that’s contrary to fostering a truly inclusive school environment that values each student as an individual.
