Principals due review of sidewalk free speech
YOUR SCHOOLS
Columbus City Schools Superintendent Dan Good has pledged to improve training so that principals know that the district’s right to control peaceful free-speech activities around a school building ends at the city sidewalk.
The issue arose when Ruth Colker, a professor of constitutional law at Ohio State University, told the school board during its meeting Tuesday that a principal on two occasions last month told people handing out leaflets outside a district school building to leave, or district security guards would be called.
“Both times, the people cooperated and left,” Colker said after the meeting. “They did not want to create an incident.”
The leaflets were in Spanish and dealt with immigration rights. The incident occurred at the end of the day, as school was letting out and parents were waiting to pick up students.
As someone who has taught constitutional law for three decades, Colker said it is her opinion that the principal violated the free-speech rights of the people passing out the leaflets by threatening to involve district security. Colker cited a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case, Grayned v. City of Rockford, in which the court held that “the public sidewalk adjacent to school grounds may not be declared off-limits for expressive activity by members of the public.”
Colker said that she is the legal representative of the people who were instructed to leave the sidewalk, but that they do not plan to sue the district. She became involved after they called her seeking legal advice.
The leafleteers weren’t interfering with traffic, weren’t distributing offensive material, weren’t putting public safety at risk, and weren’t seeking to communicate with students, Colker said. In short, she contended, they weren’t doing anything wrong.
Colker said that a tape of the incident reveals that the principal’s objection arose largely from disagreement with the message on the fliers — a “content based” objection, she said. Colker wouldn’t name the school where the incidents occurred on March 9 and 23.
District administrators were aware of the first incident but did nothing to change the principal’s conduct during the two weeks before the second incident, Colker said. She urged the school board to develop a “constitutional policy” that doesn’t disrupt the right to communicate on matters of public concern outside schools.
Superintendent Good said in an interview after the meeting that this is the first time he has heard of such an incident under his watch.
“We’ll address it right away,” he told The Dispatch. “We certainly educate (principals) to that end. I think we heard this evening that there was an incident where the evidence would dictate otherwise, so we need to refresh them.
“Sometimes they’re very emotionally charged situations, but again, we’ll refresh our administrators’ understanding of what is allowable and what isn’t.”