Something Else Schools Can't Do -- Teach

About sex that is.

According to a District Attorney in Juneau County, Wisconsin, if teachers follow their state's new sex education law they risk being prosecuted for "misdemeanor or felony delinquency of a minor, with maximum punishments ranging from nine months in jail to six years in prison."

He suggested in his letter to school districts that someone instructing students under 16 in the use of contraceptives is punishable because "the 'natural and probable consequences' of the teacher's instruction is to cause that child to engage in sexual intercourse with a child".

Read the rest of the article here.

So, apparently, this DA thinks it is a criminal act to even cause a kid to think about sex. And that is regardless of whether what is taught actually causes sex or is designed for the purpose of protecting students from some of the consequences of their youthful indiscretions.

And Now Something that Schools Cannot Do to Kids

And Now Something that Schools Cannot Do to Kids - ridicule a child and have the school police escort her out of the room for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

But that appears to be just what happened to a 13 year old at the Roberto Clemente Middle School in Montgomery County, Virginia, last month. It happened despite it being settled law since 1943 that one cannot be forced to say the Pledge or participate in other patriotic exercises and despite the fact that the school handbook even says that kids cannot be disciplined for refusal to participate.

See the full story here.

Post comments below to ask me about other things that you want to know whether schools can do to kids and I'll consider a Ten Things list.

Prof. Gates' Unconstitutional Arrest - Forbes.com

It may have been a Town v. Gown controversy rather than a racial incident. Or even, as Steven Colbert proposed on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," a jock v. nerd matter with Sgt. Crowley as the jock and Prof. Gates, pictured riding his tricycle on Martha's Vineyard, as the nerd. But I prefer to agree with Massachusetts criminal defense and civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate, who, in this Forbes commentary, "Prof. Gate's Unconstitutional Arrest: There's a First Amendment right to be rude to a cop," argued persuasively that "fundamentally the situation can, and should, be analyzed as a free speech case."


In my two plus decade criminal defense career, I too saw many police reports that parroted the words "loud and tumultuous behavior which caused a crowd to gather and created public inconvenience, annoyance and alarm." Disorderly conduct is what the Boston police used when the City's equally unconstitutional "Sauntering and Loitering" Ordinance somehow didn't fit or wasn't enough. As a new, young, white law student in 1976, I was threatened with arrest by a Cambridge police officer for insisting that he shouldn't be smoking inside the front of the Porter Square Star Market right under the "No Smoking" sign. Unlike Prof. Gates, I swallowed my First Amendment rights and stopped my confrontation upon the police officer's threat even though I knew it would have been an unconstitutional arrest.


As Atty. Silverglate points out:

There is a serious problem in this country: Police are overly sensitive to insults from those they confront. And one can hardly blame the confronted citizen, especially if the citizen is doing nothing wrong when confronted by official power. This is, after all, a free country, and if "free" means anything meaningful, it means being left alone--especially in one's own home--when one is not breaking the law.

See the article also for Atty. Silverglate's brief but thorough history of First Amendment jurisprudence and the evolution of the "four exceptions to the First Amendment's protection for free speech."

School curbs girl's report on gay rights activist Milk

The project was to create a powerpoint about a famous person to present to the class. The sixth grade girl chose Harvey Milk, the first openly gay public official in the U.S., about whom a feature film had recently been released. When it was her turn to present to the class the school principal said the teacher had to get permission from parents under the school's sex education policy for other class members to attend.

School curbs girl's report on gay rights activist Milk

The powerpoint is included in a link with the above article. Give me a break - she mentions that Milk was gay (no-duh) and the name of his partner but there was nothing else in it that should have required a parental permission slip. The ACLU is asking that she be allowed to give her presentation to the whole class and that the school give her an apology that they send to all the parents who received the original sex ed notification.

I'm all for parents having a say in the education of their children but, as the U.S. Supreme Court said in Tinker v. Illinois ..., students "do not leave all their rights at the schoolhouse door." The government should not be engaged in content-based censorship.

Students' First Amendment rights take a hit at Supreme Court

While quoting past cases such as Tinker v. DesMoines Independent School District (school could not ban anti-war armbands) and Veronia School District v. Acton (a Fourth Amendment case that went against the student but contains the language that "children assuredly do not 'shed their constitutional rights ... at the schoolhouse gate,'") the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that a Juneau, Alaska, high school could punish a student for unfurling and refusing to put away a banner that said, "BONG HITS 4 JESUS" at the Olympic torch parade on the public street outside the school.

In Morse v. Frederick Justice Roberts wrote the court's decision (5 1/2 to 3 1/2) noting that it was not unreasonable for the principal to conclude that "BONG HITS 4 JESUS" could "materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school" in the same way that sexual metaphors in a graduation speech did in Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser.

Roberts wrote that Tinker allows for students' rights to not be absolute and this case is distinguishable because the Tinker court did not go through the "material and substantial disruption analysis" that was articulated in Bethel.

Presumably the answer to the question "Do high school students in public schools have the freedom under G. L. c. 71, § 82 to engage in non-school-sponsored expression that may reasonably be considered vulgar, but causes no disruption or disorder?" is still "affirmative" in Massachusetts and that a student in a similar situation would not be able to be punished without having caused an actual disruption in a Massachusetts high school. See the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling in Jeffrey J. Pyle v. School Committee of South Hadley, 423 Mass. 283, 667 N.E.2d 869 (1996).