California Teacher Allowed to Keep Banners . . . For Now

[WSJ_law_blog]

San Diego’s Poway Unified School District has become a hotbed of free speech controversy.

First, it was sexual orientation that divided students at Poway High School. The battle culminated in a lawsuit after Tyler Chase Harper, a student, was prohibited from wearing a t-shirt to school that read, “Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned” on the front, and “Homosexuality is Shameful” on the back. Harper lost that case last year when a district judge, citing an earlier opinion, ruled that the t-shirt collided “with the rights of other students in the most fundamental way.” (Click here for LB coverage of a similar case in which the Sixth Circuit ruled in favor a Tennessee school that prohibited students from wearing “Rebel flags or symbols of [the] Rebel flag? on their clothes.)

Now another federal court has been asked to step into Poway’s free speech fray, ruling that school officials should not have made Brad Johnson, a math teacher at Westview High School, take down classroom banners with such phrases as “In God We Trust” and “God Bless America.” Here’s a report from the San Diego Union-Tribune.

In his decision, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez denied a motion by the Poway Unified School District to dismiss the case, but he didn’t order it to do anything about Johnson or the banners. Benitez noted that, according to Johnson and his lawyers, the school district allows other teachers to choose what they display on their walls, including Tibetan prayer flags and posters with Buddhist and Islamic messages.

“By squelching only Johnson’s patriotic expression, the school district does a disservice to the students of Westview High School, and the federal and state constitutions do not permit such one-sided censorship,” he wrote.

The school district’s lawyer, Jack Sleeth, said the issue isn’t as simple as Benitez made it sound. “I was surprised by the tone,” he said. “This is a really complicated issue over which reasonable minds may differ.” He asked: “How much deference should the taxpayers give to the teachers they hire to assert their own political opinions?”