Case Explained:This article breaks down the legal background, charges, and implications of Case Explained: Jury rules Tullahoma schools violated student’s First Amendment rights – Legal Perspective
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- A former student at Tullahoma High School was suspended as he entered his senior year for creating and sharing memes on Instagram of his principal.
- The student took the school system to court in 2022 for violating his First Amendment rights.
- While some of his claims were dismissed in 2024, a jury trial unanimously found that the school violated his First Amendment rights.
A jury ruled in favor of a former Tullahoma student who sued Tullahoma City Schools and members of the faculty after he was suspended for memes he created and shared off-campus in August 2022.
At a trial held this week at the U.S. District Court Eastern District of Tennessee court in Winchester, the jury decided on Jan. 15 that the school district violated the former student’s First Amendment rights.
The ruling closes a lengthy lawsuit focused on how far school administrators can go when disciplining student speech. While it was ruled that the student’s First Amendment rights were violated, the jury found that the violation did not cause the student any injury, so he was awarded $1 in nominal damages.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment legal advocacy group that served as legal counsel for the student, celebrated the ruling in a Jan. 17 press release.
“The case is important because the principal of a public high school can’t just wave a magic wand and make students’ First Amendment rights disappear,” the statement read. “The win isn’t just a victory for one student. It’s a reminder that America’s students have First Amendment rights and that would-be censors can’t threaten those rights and expect to get away with it.”
The Tullahoma school board did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
Can students share memes off campus? Courts say yes
In August 2022, a then 17-year-old rising senior — identified as “I.P.” in court filings — was called into an office by former Tullahoma High School Principal Jason Quick and Assistant Principal Derrick Crutchfield for questioning about three images taken from his personal Instagram account, according to court documents.
The first image, which I.P. reposted from his father’s home in Alabama during summer vacation, shows Quick holding a box of vegetables with the text “My brotha.”
The second image, which the student reposted during a family vacation to Italy, depicts Quick as an anime maid with cat ears and the text “Neko quick.”
The third shows Quick’s head superimposed over a character from the “Among Us” video game, as well as cartoon character Mordecai from the animated program, “Regular Show.”
Quick and Crutchfield suspended I.P. for three days based on two “school district (policies),” according to the lawsuit, including one that prohibits students, “whether at home or at school,” from posting pictures that “result in the embarrassment, demeaning, or discrediting of any student or staff,” and another that prohibits students from engaging in social media activity “unbecoming of a Wildcat.”
The suit went on to accuse Quick of “intend(ing) to cause I.P. emotional distress to deter I.P. from satirizing Quick going forward,” after I.P. had such a severe panic attack in Quick’s office that he was removed via wheelchair by his mother, with the intention of going to the emergency room.
Two days later, after the student’s mother met with Quick, Crutchfield informed her that he “reviewed the case” and reduced I.P.’s suspension to three days — the same punishment as a fistfight — after originally assigning him five days.
Quick left the school district in June 2023.
I.P.’s original lawsuit sought injunctive relief against the two district policies, as well as expungement of his suspension. Additionally, I.P. wanted the school district to declare that their policies, as well as his suspension, violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Soon after I.P’s lawsuit was filed, the school district agreed to expunge his suspension and repeal the policy they suspended him for violating.
While most of the claims were dismissed in court in late 2024, including those against Quick and Crutchfield, as well as eight of the nine claims against defendant Tullahoma City Schools, the one claim against the school alleging a violation of the student’s First Amendment rights remained.
Prior to the trial, Connor Fitzpatrick, a staff attorney at FIRE, who was serving as legal counsel on the case, told The Tennessean that the case was “exceptionally important” to “establish that school administrators do not act as a 24/7 board of censors over the expression of their students in their private lives.”
The continuing case is similar to a recent lawsuit filed in Smith County by a sophomore at Gordonsville High School, who is suing his board of education and two faculty members after he was suspended from school for a year following social media comments he made on a personal Instagram account.
The late December lawsuit accuses the school of an “unconstitutional expulsion” and a violation of his First Amendment rights.
While the Smith County’s teen’s suspension was rooted in a different district policy than I.P’s case, legal precedent for student speech remains clear.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 2021 case that unless a student’s off-campus expression “causes a substantial disruption at school, the job of policing their speech falls to parents, not the government,” and “courts must be more skeptical of a school’s efforts to regulate off-campus speech, for doing so may mean the student cannot engage in that kind of speech at all.”
The USA TODAY Network – The South region’s coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners.
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