ACLJ Urges Court of Appeals To Reverse Decision Clamping Down on Parents’ Free Speech Rights at School Board Meetings

As we told you here, the ACLJ is fighting in Congress for the rights of parents to have input into what public schools are teaching their children. We are also engaging the battle in the courts. This week, we filed an amicus brief with the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Moms for Liberty v. Brevard County Public Schools.

The case involves a school board’s “Public Participation Policy” that imposed severe restrictions on what parents and other participants could say at school board meetings. The policy banned “personally directed,” “abusive,” and “obscene” speech. For example, the ban on “personally directed” speech meant that a parent could neither commend nor criticize school officials, no matter how relevant the comment was to the topic being discussed at the meeting.

Whether speech was deemed “abusive” was completely up to the chairman and other board members. And some of the board members were just like Humpty Dumpty in the story of Alice in Wonderland: “[A] word means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” Predictably, speech was deemed “abusive” if a board member disagreed with it. For example, at one meeting, the statement that a “policy” was “evil” was deemed abusive. Another parent who questioned a board member’s commitment to constitutional rights was cut off for being “abusive.”

As for prohibiting “obscene” speech, it gets even worse. A parent questioned whether a book should have been included in the school district’s elementary school libraries. When she read from the book verbatim, she was cut off for using “obscene” speech. Think about that for a minute – the “obscene” language was fine in school library books for little children but not okay for the adults making the decisions about elementary school library collections.

And as you might guess, the school board policy’s speech restrictions were often not enforced against parents whose views aligned with the school board members.

A parental rights group, Moms for Liberty, filed suit, challenging the speech policy and asking the court to enjoin enforcement of the policy as a violation of the First Amendment. The trial court dismissed the case, reaching the stunning conclusion that the school board’s speech policy posed no First Amendment issue. The case is now on appeal before the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

As mentioned earlier, the ACLJ filed an amicus brief supporting Moms for Liberty. We argued first that the policy’s ban on “personally directed” speech was core political speech occupying the “highest rung” of First Amendment protection: “The right to speak freely to and about public officials is ‘one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes,’ Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 4 (1949), and is ‘the central meaning of the First Amendment.’ Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 273.”

We argued further that “[t]he [personally directed speech] exclusion prevents comment on the actions of the School Board members or employees, even those actions that are directly pertinent to the topic at hand in the meeting, and thus infringes on the right of concerned citizens to speak freely.” As another court explained:

Debate over public issues, including the qualifications and performance of public officials (such as a school superintendent), lies at the heart of the First Amendment. Central to these principles is the ability to question and challenge the fitness of the administrative leader of a school district, especially in a forum created specifically to foster discussion about a community’s school system.

Public school officials often forget that they report to the taxpayers, not the other way around. Concerned parents should never back down from providing input into their children’s education. Exercising one’s constitutional right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances,” even doing so with much force and vigor, should never be labled as abusive by the government.

With your ongoing support, we will continue to fight for parental rights in public schools.