The Greenwood Leflore Consolidated School District should look into how well the U.S. Constitution is being taught to high school students.
If, for example, Jazsareah Moore better understood the First Amendment, she might have been more outraged over being suspended for three days recently because she reposted on social media a video taken of a fight between two female students at Greenwood High School.
The First Amendment guarantees a person’s right to free speech in this country, and that freedom of expression is not curtailed by enrollment in a public school. Nor is it curtailed because the content of that speech might be unwanted by school officials.
Public schools can regulate what happens on their campuses, but they cannot — or at least should not — police behavior when students are away from school, which was the case when Moore reposted the video.
As far back as 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court has been firm in establishing the rights of students who attend public schools, which, unlike private schools, are arms of the state. In that 53-year-old case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, the Supreme Court ruled against school officials who prohibited students from wearing black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War, famously saying that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
As with all constitutional rights, there are some limits, and the courts do recognize that school officials can regulate certain types of student expression, such as those that might disrupt the school environment or be threatening to fellow students or staff.
But none of those possible restrictions would apply in this case. Moore said she reposted the video to defend a best friend whom she felt was being bullied.
There are conflicting accounts as to how the school’s principal, Barren Cleark, justified the penalty he imposed on Moore. Her mother said she was told by Cleark it was because her daughter was showing the school in a negative light. However, Cleark, when asked about it by this newspaper, said his focus was on student safety and limiting “any activity that will cause a disruption or adversely affect normal school operations.”
Certainly, the fight was a disruption and potentially dangerous, and the two students involved were reportedly — and justifiably — suspended. Putting the fight out for the world to see, though, was a different matter. It would be an expression that the Constitution protects.
The lesson Moore said she learned from her experience was that she can’t do anything inside of school or outside of school on social media to which school officials might object. That might be the lesson school officials hoped she would draw, but it’s not one supported by law. She has more rights than she has been led to believe.
