District suffers setback in suit

Case involves First Amendment rights

By Manor Ink Staff

Livingston Manor, NY – A local case has garnered national attention from free speech advocates and legal scholars alike, as a recent ruling by the US Court of Appeals reversed the dismissal of a lawsuit known as Case Leroy v. Livingston Manor Central School District, brought by a student challenging his suspension from Livingston Manor High School in 2021 over a posting on social media.

The post contained a picture of a friend of the then senior LMCS student kneeling on his neck with the caption “Cops got another.” The picture was not taken on school grounds, but was posted at the same time Derek Chauvin, the Minnesota police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd, was on trial. The student later said that he thought the post was a joke and that he did not understand the context. He took his post down within minutes, after getting messages regarding it – but by then the image had been reposted by others. Meanwhile, the school received many emails about the picture, with some urging the school to take disciplinary action against the student and the others involved.

In response, the student was asked not to come to school the following day and the administration had teachers hold in-class discussions about the trial and then conducted a school-wide assembly, after which some students held a protest by kneeling for nine minutes to symbolize the time Chauvin held his knee on Floyd’s throat.

The district seeks legal counsel

The school district then launched an investigation, suspending the student for five days, and hired Bethany Centrone, legal counsel for Capital Region BOCES, to investigate the matter. Centrone concluded that there was sufficient evidence to determine that the student and the others involved engaged in behavior that had violated the district’s Code of Conduct, and recommended that the matter be referred to a hearing to determine if additional discipline was warranted. The hearing officer found that the student had indeed violated the Code, which prohibited “engaging in any willful act which disrupts the normal operation of the school community,” including “off-campus misconduct that interferes ... with the educational process at the school.”

Superintendent John Evans then barred the student from participating in all extracurricular activities for the remainder of the school year, including the senior class trip, the senior prom and graduation ceremonies (although he was later able to attend graduation after that part of the suspension was lifted by court order).

A lower court had dismissed the student’s challenge to the disciplinary actions, ruling that the actions fell outside the First Amendment’s ordinary free speech protections due to the substantial disruption that the student’s post had caused within the school. The Court of Appeals reversed the judgment of the lower court, thus now allowing Leroy’s case to go forward.

A reversal of the lower court ruling

Citing prior court cases involving the tension or boundaries between a school’s right to “regulate” speech taking place off campus, Judge Barrington Parker, writing for the Court of Appeals, said that the school district’s stated ground for the discipline, that the student caused substantial disruption within the school, was insufficient grounds for the disciplinary actions. The court decided that the post did not “rise to the level of a true threat” to the school nor other students (even though some students expressed fears because of it). According to the opinion, “The conundrum requires us to draw a line between speech that is deeply offensive to other students – even reasonably so – and speech that threatens their sense of security.”

The court concluded that while “the line between the two is not always clear ... tying a student speaker’s constitutional right to free expression solely to the reaction that speech garners from upset or angry listeners ... and the disturbance in the school the next day” were insufficient to overcome the student’s right to free expression.

Steven Stern, attorney for the School District, said they were “very disappointed by the decision,” and that the decision was “at odds and problematic” in view of other court cases involving a school district’s ability to protect the “safety and teaching environs.”

He said a petition had been filed seeking reconsideration of the decision by the full panel of justices on the Court of Appeals. Stern also confirmed that the costs of the School District’s defense are being covered by its insurance policy.