Editorial: Turn school free speech issues into teachable moments

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Several recent events within the Baldwin County School System have turned the focus onto freedom of speech for our county’s students.

Events this summer at Spanish Fort High involving an AP Government class reading list led to SFHS senior Julia Coccaro submitting a formal complaint to the school system that several students’ rights to free speech and freedom of expression had been trampled on by the school’s administration - a complaint currently being investigated by an outside party at the school board’s behest.

This week, another speech related controversy popped up in Robertsdale, as a social media post surfaced with students holding “Make America Great Again” signs and a homemade sign that read “Put the Panic back in Hispanic,” which has lead to investigations by county and school officials.

Moments like these are uncommon within the Baldwin County School System, and we feel they both present teachable moments to help instruct and advise our county’s young people on what their rights are and how they can be exercised.

As members of the free press, our editorial board knows how important our First Amendment rights can be, but when it comes to our nation’s schools, a different standard actually applies.

Many of us remember the words from the Supreme Court case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, that students “do not shed their rights at the schoolhouse gate” when it comes to free speech or expression.

That notion changed slightly in 1988 with another case, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, where the Supreme Court found in a 5-3 decision that school administrators had the right to exercise prior restraint of school-sponsored expression if that prior restraint is “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”

Or, to put it simply, if it disrupts the ability of students to learn or faculty members to teach, administrators have the right and, some would argue, the responsibility to regulate and potentially censor speech and expression within their schools’ walls.

Incidents like the ones we’ve had recently in our county show the importance of administrators exercising their rights to potentially censor speech and provides a perfect opportunity to explain to our students why certain types of speech or expression might be curtailed.

We urge our teachers and administrators to take these incidents and use them to help further educate students on a plethora of topics: freedoms of speech and expression and their limitations, appropriate speech, context and more.

Further equipping our children and grandchildren with more knowledge about how the world around them truly works will benefit us all.