By Katy Bergman, The Kansas City Star
Last April, when many Shawnee Mission students participated in national walkouts in the wake of the Parkland, Fla. school shooting, an eighth-grader approached the speaking platform at a student-organized protest at Hocker Grove Middle School.
She was the third speaker in a 17-minute event scheduled on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting, when students across the country simultaneously advocated for gun law reform.
Though school officials had said they would not sponsor the April 20 event, they said they would allow students to participate without fear of punishment.
But before the eighth-grader spoke, Hocker Grove officials had already begun cracking down on students who mentioned school shootings or gun violence in their speeches, students alleged in a lawsuit filed last year by the ACLU of Kansas.
“No shootings, no deaths,” an assistant principal allegedly told the person who spoke before the eighth-grader, according to court documents. “If you can’t comply with the rules, you’ll be removed.”
Then it was the eighth grader’s turn.
“The school administration wants us to keep this about school violence and not about the real issue here,” she said to the crowd. “The real issue is gun violence.”
An administrator ordered the eighth-grader — named only by the initials M.C. in court documents — to step off the platform before she was sent home for “being the most disruptive child in the school.”
And the protest came to an abrupt, and early, end.
The Shawnee Mission School District will apologize to the eighth-grader, as well as to two other students who say the district violated their First Amendment rights, according to settlement terms that became public Tuesday.
The settlement to the May 31 lawsuit also requires district administrators and teachers to attend a First Amendment training program and adopt policies that prevent the district from censoring or controlling political speech associated with non-school sponsored events unless it is to avoid a “material disruption.” The district also cannot ban student journalists from on-campus events open to the student body.
The district will pay $40,000 for the students’ attorney fees. As of late November, the district itself had spent more than $36,000 on legal fees associated with the case.
The settlement has been signed by School Board President Brad Stratton and the students’ representatives. But it must be finalized by a judge before the district or the ACLU will comment on the terms.
According to the lawsuit, school administrators issued mandates to prohibit students from discussing guns, gun control and school shootings during the events. Statements made later by officials indicated that they felt doing so would protect a public institution from taking “a stand one way or the other on Second Amendment rights.”
In the settlement, the district confirms that it “developed a coordinated, multi-site plan to adjust the focus of the planned student protests so that the protests would generically emphasize ‘school safety.’”
The lawsuit had also alleged that when students did not comply, officials threatened students with discipline.
“When students resisted the District’s efforts at censorship, District officials interrupted students, ordered them to stop speaking, threatened students with discipline and, in some cases, confiscated the tools that students were using to document the protests,” court documents read.
At Shawnee Mission North High School, students did comply with the speech requirements, but many stayed outside after the event to discuss topics such as gun reform. School officials permitted this, the plaintiffs have said, but attempted to send only student journalists inside.
A student journalist had her camera confiscated by a school official, who ordered her to leave the school protest she was documenting for the school newspaper and yearbook. The camera was returned to her after school. Another Shawnee Mission North student journalist attended the event and later requested to “hear the messages that students originally intended to express at the walkout.”
The lawsuit said officials denied that request.
The Hocker Grove eighth-grader who was sent home was suspended along with several other students for protesting the cancellation of the event, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit had originally specifically named interim superintendent Kenny Southwick for refusing to “acknowledge that (district) actions violated students’ rights” in meetings with students following the protest.
Southwick had opened an investigation into the First Amendment violations and issued a district apology to parents. While the ACLU of Kansas sent letters to the district asking for corrective action plans, apologies and conversations about student rights from district leaders, the organization was ultimately not satisfied with the district response.
The Shawnee Mission School Board, who has since hired new superintendent Michael Fulton, approved the terms of the settlement on March 5.