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A federal appeals court has settled the latest tug-of-war between a student’s First Amendment right to free speech and her school district’s ability to limit that speech in the interests of furthering the school’s educational purposes. In
Robertson v. Anderson Mill Elementary School, 2021 WL 786631 (4th Cir. Mar. 2, 2021) the Fourth Circuit was called upon to decide whether a school district had properly exercised its authority to control the educational process by refusing to publish a fourth-grader’s “essay to society” on LGBTQ equality.
The case involved an assignment given to fourth grade students at Anderson Mill Elementary School in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The teacher required the students to write an “essay to society” on any topic of their choosing. The essays would then be compiled into a booklet and distributed to each fourth grade classroom, and copies would be sent home with the students. The plaintiff elected to write her essay about LGBTQ equality because her maternal grandmother is a member of the LGBTQ community. The school’s principal vetted the essays before publication of the booklet and determined that the subject matter of the essay was not age-appropriate, so she instructed the plaintiff’s teacher to inform the student that the essay would not be published. Plaintiff’s parents sued, arguing that the school district had improperly infringed her First Amendment right to free speech.