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Va. school district settles lawsuit with student who sued over dress code
Eighth-grader was prohibited from wearing T-shirt that depicted images of weapons
March 4, 2004

VIRGINIA — A middle school student who sued his school district over its dress code has agreed to settle the case with the school board.Eighth-grader Alan Newsom and his father sued Albemarle County School Board in September 2002, alleging that a Jack Jouett Middle School assistant principal violated his First Amendment right to free expression by requiring him to wear his National Rifle Association T-shirt inside out. The purple T-shirt included the phrase “NRA Sports Shooting Camp” and featured three silhouettes of men holding guns. Both sides said they could not disclose details of the settlement.”This was a case that should never have had to go to litigation,” said Dan Zavadil, Newsom’s attorney, who took the case on behalf of the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund. “A student’s rights are clear and were clear at the time that we started. [We] made efforts to resolve this short of litigation. At one point, we even offered to accept just an apology and [a promise that the school] won’t do it again.”When the administrator asked Newsom to conceal the image on his shirt, the school’s dress code did not prohibit clothing depicting weapons, according to court documents. The administrator told Newsom to wear the T-shirt inside out because the shirt reminded her of the Columbine High School shootings, court documents say. The school board then changed the policy, banning all images of weapons on clothing. In December 2003, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that Albemarle County School Board could not enforce its revised dress code until the lawsuit was resolved. The court ruled the revised policy was too broad and that the NRA T-shirt did not disrupt the school.According to the settlement, reached Feb.20, “The parties recognize the rights and responsibilities of the students in the school system and the School Board’s continued support for its teachers and administrators.”Newsom sought $100,000 in compensatory damages and $50,000 in punitive damages, as well as legal fees, which the NRA estimated to be $127,000 in mid-January, according to a Feb. 26 article in The Hook magazine. “It is somewhat ironic that we’ve got a First Amendment case that we can’t talk about,” Zavadil said, referring to an agreement that the terms of the settlement not be disclosed.The Jouett Handbook has been revised to allow students to wear an article of clothing “provided it does not disrupt the educational environment. “ The revision has been distributed to students.Under the new policy, Newsom could wear his NRA T-shirt, said Mark Trank, the deputy attorney for Albemarle County. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case Tinker v. Des Moines Community School District applies to the student dress code in this case, he said.In that decision, the court ruled that public school students ‘’do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District

In December 1965, Des Moines, Iowa residents John F. Tinker (15 years old), John’s younger sister Mary Beth Tinker (13 years old), and their friend Christopher Eckhardt (16 years old) decided to wear black armbands to their schools (high school for John and Christopher, junior high for Mary Beth) in protest of the Vietnam War and supporting the Christmas Truce called for by Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The principals of the Des Moines schools adopted a policy banning the wearing of armbands to school. Violating students would be suspended and allowed to return to school after agreeing to comply with the policy. Mary Beth Tinker and Christopher Eckhardt chose to violate this policy, and the next day John Tinker also did so. All were suspended from school until after January 1, 1966, when their protest had been scheduled to end.

A suit was not filed until after the Iowa Civil Liberties Union approached their family, and the ACLU agreed to help the family with the lawsuit. Their parents, in turn, filed suit in U.S. District Court, which upheld the decision of the Des Moines school board. A tie vote in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit meant that the U.S. District Court’s decision continued to stand, and forced the Tinkers and Eckhardts to appeal to the Supreme Court directly. The case was argued before the court on November 12, 1968.
The court’s decision

The court’s 7 to 2 decision held that the First Amendment applied to public schools, and that administrators would have to demonstrate constitutionally valid reasons for any specific regulation of speech in the classroom. The court observed, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” [1] Justice Abe Fortas wrote the majority opinion, holding that the speech regulation at issue in Tinker was “based upon an urgent wish to avoid the controversy which might result from the expression, even by the silent symbol of armbands, of opposition to this Nation’s part in the conflagration in Vietnam.” The Court held that in order for school officials to justify censoring speech, they “must be able to show that [their] action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint,” allowing schools to forbid conduct that would “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.”[2] The Court found that the actions of the Tinkers in wearing armbands did not cause disruption and held that their activity represented constitutionally protected symbolic speech.