Presser: Kansas AG Kris Kobach Champions Student Free Speech

We won't opine much . . . But when it comes to tees in school. All of the precedent seems to suggest that students don't have many rights and the courts always seem to side with teachers & administrators. 

However . . . This note is worth checking . . .

AG Kobach files brief to protect students' free speech rights

TOPEKA - (Nov. 13, 2024) – Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach yesterday filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, along with 17 other states, to protect students’ First Amendment free speech rights.

A middle school student in Massachusetts wore a t-shirt to school that had the message, “There are only two genders.” School officials told the student he couldn’t wear the shirt. The student then put tape over the word “two,” so the message read, “There are only (censored) genders,” but school officials banned that too.

"The right to free speech does not disappear inside a school building. The First Amendment protects this student's right to speak -- even when that speech is disfavored by woke school administrators," Kobach said.

The brief from the attorneys general asks the Supreme Court to hear the case after a lower court sided with the school.

In referring to the 1969 case, known as Tinker, the brief argues that the Supreme Court ruled in that case that, “a student may express his mind ‘if he does so without materially and substantially interfering with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school and without colliding with the rights of others.’”

South Carolina and West Virginia co-led the brief, joined by the attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

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Developing . . .