L.A. student sues, wins right to boost milk alternatives

LOS ANGELES — When Marielle Williamson was a senior at Eagle Rock High School, she wanted to make a difference in how her peers viewed cow’s milk.

As the president of the Animal Awareness Club, she sought to educate her peers on the “lesser-known effects” that food choices have on animals and people. Her school hallways were covered in “Got Milk?” posters. But her own research showed how the dairy industry can have negative impact on the environment, including from methane gas emissions, as well as on animal welfare. She wanted her peers to know there were milk alternatives.

So she asked her school administrators about having a table outside the cafeteria where she could hand out literature that promoted plant-based milk options. But administrators said she could only do so if she promoted dairy milk as well, Williamson said, which went against her beliefs.

“It was kind of like, ‘Wow, this is serious,’ ” she said. “The hold the dairy industry has over schools is so strong that I can’t even promote soy milk at my school.”

In May, Williamson, along with the advocacy group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, filed a federal lawsuit against her school administrators and the Los Angeles Unified School District, alleging that her First Amendment rights were violated when school officials barred her from sharing material about plant-based milk options without also including information on dairy milk. The suit also named the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Williamson alleged that the agency’s policies on providing dairy milk in school cafeterias are too broad and chill the speech of students critical of cow’s milk.

Last week, L.A. Unified settled the lawsuit and acknowledged that students have a First Amendment right to nondisruptive speech that’s critical of dairy products.

Williamson and the Physicians Committee, of which she was a student member, view the settlement as a victory for their cause.

“It’s a really small step in toppling the monopoly of dairy in our school meals,” said Deborah Press, general counsel for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “But we’ve just enshrined the rights of students to speak out about it.”

The USDA, which did not join the settlement, has filed a motion to dismiss the case, Press said, but Williamson and the committee intend to pursue it and challenge federal statutes that, in part, require schools in the National School Lunch Program to serve cow’s milk during meals as a condition to receive federal funding.

“LAUSD wasn’t the problem here; they were doing their best to comply with these dogmatic federal rules,” Press said, adding that the free speech suit is intended to target the dairy industry’s role in federal school meal programs.

In order to receive a dairy milk substitute, a student is required to provide a note from a doctor or parent citing a medical or dietary need to restrict the student’s choice of milk.