Defending Mrs. Halas

By David Hill

Blue Springs, Mo.

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." So wrote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District , the 1969 decision that guaranteed public school students a right to symbolic, nondisruptive political expression at school.

Mary Beth Tinker was an 8th grader in 1965, when she and four other students decided to wear black armbands to protest the war in Vietnam. The school district, however, enacted a policy forbidding students to wear armbands for that purpose. The students did so anyway and were promptly suspended. Tinker challenged the district's policy, arguing that it violated the free-speech clause of the First Amendment, and, in a 7-2 decision, the high court agreed....