Teacher who implied child should go back to Africa needs lesson on First Amendment
A sixth-grader in Lakeland now has a police record for having refused to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance on Feb. 4. To hear adults speak about it, it isn’t because he exercised his absolute constitutional right to shun the pledge at Lawton Chiles Middle Academy. Rather, it’s because of what they called his disruptive behavior after the teacher, substitute Ana Alvarez, provoked him. Their excuse is pathetic.
By the teacher’s own handwritten account, she goaded the boy after he said he considered the flag and the national anthem to be “racist” against black people. Why, then, not go someplace else to live? Yes, a grown woman said that to a child. “They brought me here,” the boy replied. “Well, you can always go back,” she said, “because I came here from Cuba, and the day I feel I’m not welcome here anymore, I would find another place to live.” She called for school administrators, which is when matters went from bad to worse. Why did she alert the office? “Because I did not want to continue dealing with him.”
She shouldn’t even have started. “This arrest,” said the Lakeland police, “was based on the student’s choice to disrupt the classroom, make threats and resisting the officer’s efforts to leave the classroom.”
Beg pardon? How about the teacher’s choice to deny the child his constitutional rights, begin an outrageously improper argument with him and insult him by implying he should go back to Africa? One would expect better judgment and behavior from the adult in that schoolroom.
She should not be a teacher — not even as a substitute — until she learns something more about the Constitution of her adopted country.
The Polk County schools say she won’t be back in their classrooms and that Kelly Services, which supplies substitutes, will be contacted “to further refine how our substitutes are trained.” The adequacy of their training, if any, is a pertinent question.
Removing the teacher does not atone for the injustice done to the boy who, according to his mother, is an honor student. It won’t restore the education he lost during a three-day suspension. It won’t immediately expunge his juvenile record. Better late than never, someone should exercise mature discretion and drop the misdemeanor charges before they go to court.
If the adults insist on formality, they might plead Florida law. Statute 1003.44 says a student may be excused from reciting the pledge or even standing for it “upon written request by his or her parent.” It’s unknown whether such a request was on file in this case. However, the Polk school district did not cite that in rationalizing that the boy was arrested not for refusing to stand or recite, but for being disruptive afterward. To our knowledge, most teachers simply let it pass when they see students not standing for or reciting the pledge. As they should.
The constitutional principle Alvarez flouted was established in 1942, during the darkest days of World War II, when the Supreme Court ruled that West Virginia could not expel children for refusing to say the pledge. The children in that case were Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose faith regards the flag as a “graven image” the Bible says they may not worship. The parents were threatened with prosecution and the children with being sent to reformatories.
Justice Robert Jackson’s majority opinion went to the heart of why there is a First Amendment and why it must be respected.
“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”
In the most often-quoted paragraph, Jackson wrote this:
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”
The justice who wrote that eloquent definition of Americanism later took leave from the Supreme Court to serve as chief prosecutor of the principal Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.