california. grade school. judge rules that they have no first amendment rights;

A California judge has ruled that teachers were right to punish a seven-year-old girl over a Black Lives Matter drawing because ‘she’s too young to have First Amendment rights.’

The first grader was banned from recess and drawing pictures at Viejo Elementary in Orange County after she added the words ‘any life’ below Black Lives Matter on a picture she drew and and gave to a black friend.

The picture showed the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ with four round shapes in various different tones of brown, beige and yellow, which was intended to ‘represent her friends’ who were ‘racially-mixed’.

The girl’s family filed a lawsuit last year against the Capistrano Unified School District, claiming her First Amendment Rights were violated during the 2021 incident.

But US Central District Court Judge David Carter ruled that ‘Students have the right to be free from speech that denigrates their race while at school’. Carter added that the drawing was not protected by the First Amendment because of the age of the girl, named B.B. in the suit, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Judge Carter wrote: ‘An elementary school … is not a marketplace of ideas… Thus, the downsides of regulating speech there is not as significant as it is in high schools, where students are approaching voting age and controversial speech could spark conducive conversation.’

Moreover, Judge Carter wrote, ‘a parent might second-guess (the principal’s) conclusion, but his decision to discipline B.B. belongs to him, not the federal courts.’

Carter added that ‘Undoubtedly, B.B.’s intentions were innocent… B.B. testified that she gifted the Drawing to M.C. to make her feel comfortable after her class learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’...........more.......