The U.S. Supreme Court declined last week to hear a student’s challenge to a Texas school district’s dress code that prohibits most messages, including political slogans, on student shirts.
Returning from a holiday recess, the justices also refused appeals on teacher testing and school district taxation of satellite-TV revenues.
In the T-shirt case, a student and his parents appealed a decision last August by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans, that upheld the denial of a preliminary injunction sought by Paul Palmer, a student at Waxahachie High School, in Waxahachie, Texas.
More Supreme Court coverage at The School Law blog.
In 2007, Mr. Palmer sought permission to wear shirts with messages supporting the presidential campaign of John Edwards, as well as another shirt extolling free speech and the First Amendment.
School officials said the shirts violated a dress code that permits only small logos or symbols of school clubs or those promoting school spirit. The dress code allows political messages on buttons, pins, and wristbands.
Mr. Palmer and his parents sued under the First Amendment, arguing that wearing the shirts would not disrupt school, that they were not drug-related or sexually explicit, and that their wearing would not appear as school-sponsored speech and thus would be protected expression.
The family lost in both a federal district court and in the 5th Circuit, which ruled Aug. 13 that the dress code’s restriction on messages was a content-neutral regulation of speech.
‘Working World’
The appeals court said one goal of the Waxahachie school district’s dress code, “promoting professional and responsible dress,” was justifiable “because students are prepared for a working world in which pins and buttons may be appropriate at work but large, stark political message T-shirts usually are not.”
Mr. Palmer’s appeal to the Supreme Court said the 5th Circuit decision “threatens to vest government-run schools with virtually unfettered authority to censor student speech.”
The appeal attracted support from legal groups including the American Center for Law and Justice, the Institute for Justice, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and the Christian Legal Society.
The district urged the justices to deny the appeal, saying the 5th Circuit decision was correct, and that because the case involved a preliminary injunction, it was a poor vehicle for Supreme Court review.
The justices declined without comment to hear the appeal in Palmer v. Waxahachie Independent School District (Case No. 09-409).
In the teacher-testing case, the justices declined without comment an appeal by a New York City teacher with dyslexia who sought an accommodation to use a dictionary as a spelling aid for the essay portion of a state teaching test.
Marsha Falchenberg sued after she lost her job as a result of her failure to pass New York state’s Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, or LAST. She lost in both a federal district court and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, in New York, which ruled last year that spelling was among the skills beingtested on the LAST and thus that no accommodation was required under federal disability law.
The appeal was Falchenberg v. New York City Department of Education (No. 09-471).
Finally, the justices declined an appeal by the state of Kentucky and the Frankfort school district of court rulings that invalidated a state law applying school taxes to providers of direct satellite television. The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that state tax law was pre-empted by the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996.
The case was Treesh v. DirecTV Inc. (No. 09-355).
