If the photos and quotes violated school policy, then the students and their parents should have been notified of such in time to retake photographs/resubmit quotes…or at the very least should have been informed that their submissions were being removed from the yearbook before it was printed. It seems that did not happen, because there was no violation of policy on the part of the students; the only wrong here was on the part of the staff member who unilaterally chose to alter the yearbook content because it offended their political sensibilities.
The story is, as far as I can tell, that it’s a public school that censored such mention of ‘Trump’ but didn’t censor such mention of ‘Obama’. Seems a bridge too far.
That’s one opinion. I’d say the two methods of expression differ slightly. Both the students and the teacher were taking actions to express a political opinion. The students wanted to put political messages into the yearbook. The teacher wanted to take political messages out of the yearbook.
The students were punished by having their yearbooks edited. It seems extremely disproportionate to punish the teacher by firing him. The teacher did not expel or suspend the students. If the school board wants to punish the teacher, they can remove his picture from the yearbook.
Yes it does. The teacher should be punished. But only to the extent he punished the students, as I suggested in my previous post. You should not punish one side a hundred times more severely than you punish the other.
You’re messing with us, right?
That’s probably the better stance. Still, you don’t get to use your job to censor someone else.
Assuming I’m not missing a reference or joke here:
The student was not punished. If I’m understanding the story, an agent of the government suppressed protected speech while carrying out official duties.
That action was not “expressing an opinion.” There are plenty of competent people who can do the job, so find someone who can do the job.
This.
We didn’t have yearbooks, but we did have class pictures and when those of my class happened to be wrong we rejected them. Distribution had started without checking; the first complaint took place as soon as the first student took his out of the envelope.
If my clothing had been edited, the photographer would have been given detailed proctological instructions. He only got paid for pictures accepted.
no, making the person who screwed up pay for it would be fair. I don’t want him fired but wearing a Trump hat for a week would be a good start.
yes but he wasn’t expressing a political opinion, he was censoring the student’s opinion.
No, I’m serious.
I don’t want to get into an argument over terms. That derails too many topics from the issue involved into a debate over what words should be used.
So would it be acceptable to say the students were wronged and move on?
I think that may be disputable. Just because a person is a government employee doesn’t make everything they do a government action. If a government employee is driving a government-owned vehicle and gets a speeding ticket, the ticket goes on his record not the government’s. You’re only acting as a government agent when you’re carrying out the policies of the government. Which as clearly not the case here; the school has clearly not condoned the teacher’s actions.
It’s hard to see a line between putting a picture into a yearbook and taking a picture out of a yearbook. If one was a political action, how was the other one not? Firing somebody for expressing their political opinions would seem to me to be sending a chilling attack against free speech that far outweighs its supposed defense.
Of course maybe that’s a truer message. The teacher had power over the students so he was able to remove their political message from the yearbook. And the school board has more power than the teacher, so it was able to suspend him and may fire him. The message both of these actions send is that you’re allowed to have free speech - as long as don’t say anything that people with power disagree with.
I’d argue he was clearly expressing the political opinion “I don’t want any Trump messages in this yearbook.”
This thread almost makes me think Trumpism is bad.
The teacher should have taken the extra step in expressing his political opinion and photoshopped the political messages of which he approved on the students’ t-shirts. That’d show them.
If they edited out all logos and graphics, and there was no policy, instruction or reasonable expectation to do that, then it’s just a deviation from the job spec. they might plausibly argue that they thought they were doing something helpful, and I would deal with it by instructing the person not to do it like that again. If they ignored this and did it again, it would be an internal discipplinary matter.
If they edited out just political logos without any partisan bias (which might be hard to tell if the only examples were from one party), again, I’d treat as above - because it could be plausibly argued that they thought they were doing something that they thought was desirable in terms of presentation standards.
If there’s any selection/bias in the editing, then I’d say it should immediately be a disciplinary process. If they thought this sort of action was desired by the school, they should have confirmed it before acting.
I think firing them for this alone would be a bit extreme, but if it’s not the first disciplinary offence (of any kind), then it could contribute to a case for dismissal.
I think there is a line:
Making a political statement by wearing it on a shirt in a photo you know will be published = expressing your political views.
Photoshopping a photo so as to remove a political statement logo = suppressing someone else’s statement of their views.
It’s subtle, and I appreciate that the pages of the yearbook may not necessarily constitute a place in which freedom of speech is expected or legally protected, but if freedom of speech is still the general principle that is being aimed for here, then ‘speaking your view’ is not equivalent to ‘silencing opposing views’.
The difference is that the students are legally permitted to express their opinions by wearing shirts with political messages.
The teacher, acting in his capacity as a government employee, is not permitted to engage in viewpoint discrimination. By deleting only Trump images, he prevents some view but not others. This, he is not permitted to do under First Amendment law.
The students should not have been “punished” at all; they didn’t violate any rules. The teacher and the students are not acting in similar capacities here and only the teacher has done something warranting punishment.
If you permit some students to offer political messages, and you’re a public school, then you cannot stop other students from offering political messages. This is basic First Amendment law relating to limited public forums. This is not a case in which the teacher publishes the yearbook at his own expense. The school publishes the yearbook, creates its content with student and staff labor, and allows political messages to be displayed. This creates a limited public forum and means that the school may not engage in viewpoint discrimination.
This indeed. But it’s not a termination-level offense. At worst the teacher ought to apologize at the next school assembly.
No. See Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U.S. 503 (1969):
This is a relatively settled area of law.