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A woman whose daughter was punished for a drawing she made by her school is filing an appeal after her case was ruled against her by a local district judge.
A Southern California mother is appealing a ruling by a district judge to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Her case regards an incident involving her daughter at Capistrano Unified School District.
The woman, Chelsea Boyle, filed a lawsuit against the Capistrano Unified School District after finding out that her first-grade daughter was punished for a drawing that she made for her friend. The mother alleges that the school retaliated against her daughter for the drawing which she says did not sit well with the school’s views of race relations.
In 2021, Boyle’s daughter was attending school at Viejo Elementary when the class covered a lesson on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Boyle’s daughter drew a picture for her friend and classmate in an effort to help her feel included in the class.
The drawing read “Black Lives Matter” and included “any life” underneath with four oval shaped figures each colored with a different shade. The friend took the picture home and showed her mother, who reached out to the school principal, “to make sure that her daughter wasn’t being singled out in class because of her race.”
The principal, Jesus Becerra, responded by having Boyle’s daughter apologize to her friend, which per reports both found confusing, and the daughter was also restricted from drawing anymore pictures for her friends, and banned from recess for two weeks. Boyle herself was never told about the incident by the school, and did not find out about it until a year later when another mom from the school told her about it.
Boyle reached out to Becerra seeking an explanation and an apology for the punishment. After she received no response, she filed a lawsuit against the district. The district judge ruled in favor of Becerra citing both qualified immunity, and that the rights of freedom of speech did not extend to the first-grader because she was too young. Boyle has since filed an appeal to the ruling which will take the case up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Boyle’s lawyers, who work for the Pacific Legal Foundation, argue that this goes against decades long precedent from the Supreme Court of the United States. They contend that free speech rights do in fact cover the rights of both “teachers and students” and that previous cases including Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District demonstrates this.
Boyle has stated that she is disturbed by the actions of the school, and her case will be heard within the next year.
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