Arizona High School illegally curbs MAGA displays

Perry High School students dressed in their MAGA gear and carried a Trump banner during Friday’s spirit day at the suburban Gilbert school.

The parents told reporters their kids were ordered to remove their MAGA clothing at lunch. The Chandler Unified School District on Monday said no one was asked to remove their MAGA shirts and hats but only to put away a Trump banner.

“The Administration only asked that the banner be put away when the students engaged in a verbal altercation and the administration was concerned that it would escalate,” the district’s statement said.

Twenty-six Republican legislators have asked Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate whether the students’ First Amendment rights were violated.

It seems to me their rights were violated, if the school district’s above response is accurate. That is, unless the courts are now ready to curb the broad freedoms afforded students to express their political views in school.

In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, issued 50 years ago last week, the Supreme Court said students had a right to wear black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War.

Justice Abe Fortas, in writing the Tinker decision, said administrators can’t interfere with a student’s right to speech unless there is evidence to show that speech will interfere “with the schools' work or of collision with the rights of other students to be secure and to be let alone.”

In the case of the kids wearing black armbands, Fortas wrote, “there is no indication that the work of the schools or any class was disrupted. Outside the classrooms, a few students made hostile remarks to the children wearing armbands, but there were no threats or acts of violence on school premises.”

The justices rejected a lower court's reasoning that the school could shut down speech "based upon their fear of a disturbance."

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