Parents of Westchester County kids against ‘preferred pronouns’ sue school district

The parents of a group of Westchester County students who don’t want to call their classmates and teachers by their “preferred pronouns’’ is suing the school district on First Amendment grounds. The federal lawsuit — brought on behalf of three unidentified parents by the right-wing advocacy group “Parents Defending Education” last week — claims the Croton-Harmon School District’s policies “punish students for their speech and compel them to mouth support for the District’s preferred views at all times of day, whether at school or not. “Nearly a century of Supreme Court precedent makes two things clear: Minor students have the freedom to speak, and students do not abandon this freedom at the schoolhouse gate,” the lawsuit said. “Yet the Croton-Harmon School District, along with its officials and its board of education, has rules and regulations that punish students for engaging in protected speech. “These speech codes deter students from expressing views about the political and social issues of the day that are outside the mainstream,” the suit continued. “They disregard decades of precedent.” The suit, filed in federal court in White Plains, notes the plaintiff parents’ deeply conservative views, which take aim at such issues as gay marriage, surrogate pregnancies, trans people, abortion, Black Lives Matter and immigration. It says their kids — who share these views — are afraid to talk about such topics because “they fear that sharing their beliefs will be considered ‘harassment’ ” based on the district’s policies against bullying, discrimination and gender-identity discrimination. “For example, they fear that others will find their views ‘hostile,’ ‘ridiculing,’ or ‘demeaning’ and claim that their views “interfere with” their educational environment or their ‘mental [or] emotional … well-being,’ especially if they share those views repeatedly,” the suit said. For example, “Parent B’s children wish to use pronouns that are consistent with a teacher’s or classmate’s biological sex rather than their ‘preferred pronouns’ — the pronouns that the classmate or teacher has decided reflects their gender identity,” the suit said. “Parent B’s children wish to use the biologically accurate pronouns repeatedly and at all times, including inside and outside the classroom, in the classmate’s or teacher’s presence, and when referring to the classmate or teacher outside their presence.” On Thursday, Croton-Harmon sent a letter to district parents saying that “contrary to what the Parents Defending Education group may assert, we are proud that there is no place in our schools for hurtful and hateful rhetoric. “We see schools as places where students feel comfortable in, and celebrated for, their own identity and are positioned to make positive contributions to our society,” the letter said. “Speech that is harmful to students, which Parents Defending Education suggests should be permitted in its lawsuit, is not welcome in our schools, and does not align with our beliefs as a school district community. “We know that this isn’t the first time that our incredible schools have been made targets of political agendas, and we will not allow a lawsuit, or other extraneous political factors, to distract us from the work of making that vision into a reality for all of our students, staff members, and community.” The lawsuit’s chances at success are unclear. But public schools have broad power to limit offensive and controversial speech on their campuses, said Bennnett Gershman, a constitutional law professor at Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law, to the Journal News. “Schools can always regulate offensive speech,” Gershman said. “The [US] Supreme Court has made very clear that schools can regulate offensive speech. And if schools deem this speech is offensive, the schools can prohibit it.” Without such limitations, kids would be “growing up in a cacophony of profanity and screaming and yelling,” Gershman said, adding that the courts tend to defer to school authorities when trying to determine exactly what kind of speech is abusive.