W H AT A R E Y O U R C O N S T I T U T I O N A L R I G H T S I N T H E C L A SS R O O M ? T H E S U P R E M E C O U RT H A S

S TAT E D T H AT S T U D E N T S D O N O T “ S H E D T H E I R C O N S T I T U T I O N A L R I G H T S … AT T H E

S C H O O L H O U S E G AT E , ” B I T I T H A S A L S O R E C O G N I Z E D S P E C I A L C I R C U M S TA N C E S T H AT

C A N L I M I T T H E F U L L E X E R C I S E O F T H O S E R I G H T S AT S C H O O L

Is This Constitutional?

Exercise of Religious BeliefsThe First Amendment

Your state passes a law requiring all students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The law provides that students who refuse to comply may be expelled from school. You are a member of a religion that believes that a pledge to a nation’s flag violates the Bible’s teachings against the worship of images. When you refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag in your classroom, you are threatened with expulsion from school unless you agree to say the pledge.

Mandatory Drug TestingThe Fourth Amendment

Your school has passed a new policy that requires any student who participates in extracurricular activities to (1) take a drug test before participating. (2) submit to random drug testing while participating in the activity, and (3) agree to be tested for drugs at any time upon reasonable suspicion.

Student ProtestsThe First Amendment

The United States is engaged in a controversial war. You and a group of your friends decide to wear black armbands to school to protest the war. The school hears of your plans and adopts a policy that prohibits students from wearing armbands to school. Students who violate the policy will be suspended until they return to school without armbands.

Disciplinary Suspensions and Due Process The Fourteenth Amendment

A law in your state allows a school principal to suspend a student for misconduct for up to 10 days or to expel the student. The principal must notify the suspended or expelled student’s parents within 24 hours and explain the reasons for the suspension or expulsion. Expelled students may appeal the decision and have a hearing before the school committee. Suspended students are not given the right to a hearing.

Censorship and Student-Run Newspapers:The First Amendment

You are the editor of a student-run newspaper at your local school. You have decided to run two stories, one that discusses students’ experiences with teen pregnancy and a second that looks at the impact of divorce on students at your school. The school principal reviews page proofs of the newspaper before it is published. He decides to remove the pages on which these two articles appear, citing concerns that students described in the teen-pregnancy article might be identified, that discussions of sexual activity and birth control might be inappropriate for some students, and that a father who is criticized in the article on divorce was not given a chance to respond.

Exercise of Religious BeliefsThe First Amendment

A law compelling students to pledge allegiance to the flag is not constitutional, the Supreme Court decided in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” wrote Justice Jackson, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” The action of the West Virginia officials in compelling a pledge to the flag overstepped the constitutional limits on their power and invaded “the sphere of intellect and spirit which is the purpose of the First Amendment of our Constitution to reserve from all official control.”

Mandatory Drug TestingThe Fourth Amendment

A mandatory drug-testing scheme for students participating in extracurricular activities is constitutional, the Supreme Court decided in Board of Education of Independent School District No. 92 of Pottawatomie County v Earls (2002). The Fourth Amendment protects “the right of people to be secure in their persons… against unreasonable searches and seizures. The question for the Court, wrote Justice Thomas, is thus the reasonableness of the “search involved, in criminal contexts, the Court usually determines whether the government had established “probable cause” for the search. But in the context of safety and health regulations, a search unsupported by probable cause may be reasonable when “special needs” are involved. Public schools are one area

Where such special needs have been recognized. Schools act as guardians of the students in their care, and students have a diminished expectation of privacy in a school environment. Participation in extracurricular activities requires voluntary submission to additional rules, which further diminishes the expectation of privacy. The worst penalty that could result from the tests was limiting a student’s privilege to participate in extracurricular activities. Finally, drug abuse among students remains a real and immediate concern for schools. Balancing all these factors, a majority of the Court’s justices found the drug-testing scheme permissible under the Fourth Amendment.

Student ProtestsThe First Amendment

A school ban on armbands protesting U.S. participation in a war is not constitutional, the Supreme Court decided in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969). Writing for the majority, Justice Fortas asserted that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” He classified the wearing of protest armbands as “closely akin to ‘pure speech’ which, we have repeatedly held, is entitled to comprehensive protection, under the First Amendment.” The students’ expression of opinion was silent and passive and did not intrude upon the work of the school or the rights of other students. Moreover, the school had singled out one form of symbolic expression-the wearing of armbands-while other students were allowed to wear buttons

Student ProtestsThe First Amendment

For political campaigns and other symbolic items. A prohibition on expression of one particular opinion is constitutionally impermissible absent a showing that the expression of that opinion would cause “material and substantial interference with schoolwork or discipline.”

Disciplinary Suspensions and Due Process The Fourteenth Amendment

Suspension of a student without some form of hearing is not constitutional, the Supreme Court decided in Goss v. Lopez (1975). The Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” In an opinion written by Justice White, the Court declared that by providing the benefit of a public education to its citizens, the state of Ohio had created an entitlement to public education. This entitlement is a property interest protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That interest cannot be taken away, even if only temporarily, without giving the student at least some opportunity to hear the reasons for the suspension and, if the student denies them, the chance to tell his or her own side of the story.

Disagree? So did Justices Powell, Blackmun, Rehnquist, and Chief Justice Burger. The dissenting justices saw the majority opinions requirement for a hearing as an “unprecedented intrusion into the process of elementary and secondary education.” They argued that the hearing requirement improperly gave federal courts, rather than educational officials and state legislatures, authority over routine classroom discipline of students. The dissenters also felt that a suspension of no more than 10 days- less than 5 percent of the normal school year- should not assume constitutional dimensions.

Censorship and Student-Run Newspapers:The First Amendment

Censorship of the articles in the school newspaper on teen pregnancy and the impact of divorce was constitutional, the Supreme Court decided in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier (1988). In an opinion written by Justice White, the Court state that the rights of students in a public school “are automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings.” Because the school newspaper was part of the educational curriculum and remained under the oversight of teachers and school administrators, the newspaper could not be described as a public forum for speech. School officials were entitled to regulate its contents in “any reasonable manner.” Moreover, the First Amendment does not require a school to affirmatively promote particular student speech

Censorship and Student-Run Newspapers:The First Amendment

in publications or activities that “the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school.” The school is not required to disseminate student speech that does not meet the standards established by the school, or that might appear to advocated behavior or positions inconsistent with shared social values.

Censorship and Student-Run Newspapers:The First Amendment

Disagree? So did Justices Brennan, Marshall, and Blackmun. These justices argued that “the mere fact of school sponsorship does not …license such thought control in the high school.” While they acknowledged that a school had the right to limit the scope of a school-sponsored publication to specific, objectively defined topics (such as literary criticism or school sports), they argued that limiting a publication on the basis of “potential topic sensitivity” is a vaporous non-standard that.. Chills student speech to which school officials might not object.” They also felt that, even if the majority of the Court was correct in its analysis, the means of censorship used-simply excising the pages of the newspaper which the offending articles appeared- was much too broad. By

Censorship and Student-Run Newspapers:The First Amendment

Ignoring the “obvious alternatives” (delaying publication, requiring precise deletions or changes), the principal demonstrated “unthinking contempt for

individual rights.”