First Amendment rights don’t disappear when you walk through the school gates. Since America’s founding, students of all ages have exercised, and do exercise, their freedoms of speech, assembly, religion and expression.
At the same time, schools can impose reasonable restrictions on how students express themselves if their speech disrupts the school environment or violates the rights of others. It’s important to note that K-12 students under the age of 18 have different protections than adult college students. Whether a school can punish a student’s speech depends on when, where, and how the speech is expressed.
That is why it is important that everyone, including students and advocates, learn about student rights.
To help people of all ages, but especially young people, understand their First Amendment rights, I worked with the ACLU to create a cartoon series that shows students how they can speak up at school.
Emerson Sykes, senior attorney at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, who has worked on some of the cases featured in the comic series, explained to me why there’s a fundamental difference between First Amendment rights in K-12 education and higher education:
“K-12 education is focused on age-appropriate education — imparting the tools, skills and information the next generation needs to advance — but not necessarily pushing the boundaries of human understanding and knowledge, like higher education is,” Sykes said.
To help students make informed choices, Sykes and I focused on student rights, both at an educational and societal level, in the third and final cartoon in the series. Sykes said he hopes that, based on information, students will be able to make informed choices about what risks they might be taking when standing up for causes they believe in.
Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded videos.
“While most people want to avoid contact with police, some intend to engage in illegal protests and are prepared to be arrested in the hope that being detained will bring awareness to their activities. This form of civil disobedience is ancient,” Sykes said. “But there are many different types of activism, and knowing where the line is between what is protected by the First Amendment and what is breaking the law can help you stay focused.”
The cartoon series helps students understand their rights and also provides examples of free speech in schools. The first cartoon focused on K-12 students and told the story of Anthony Crawford, an Oklahoma high school teacher who challenged HB 1775, a classroom censorship law aimed at restricting conversations about race, racism, sex, and gender in the classroom. In June, an Oklahoma district court blocked some of the provisions of HB 1775 while the lawsuit was pending, giving students and teachers the opportunity to exercise their free speech rights in schools.
Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded videos.
The second cartoon depicts the courage shown by students from the University of Florida’s Students for Justice in Palestine when the group was suspended by the government for providing “material support to terrorism.” The cartoon reminds students that while defending their First Amendment rights can be tough, unlawful attempts to censor political speech or any speech at all will not be tolerated in schools.
Today, as students, educators and communities prepare for a new school year, we hope this cartoon series will guide us about our rights and remind us that being at school does not mean we lose our First Amendment rights.