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“There was no legitimate basis for believing Hoedel or Yeargain were engaged in the unauthorized practice of law,” said Lauren Bonds, legal director for ACLU of Kansas. “As an attorney, he really should’ve known that Cindy and Scott’s activism didn’t constitute a law practice.”

Following a wave of feedback to an original draft that raised censorship concerns, the Shawnee Mission Board of Education on Monday advanced updated policy language on student publications that integrated input received from students and patrons.

The organization filed a motion last week denouncing the “bizarre and illegal sentence” and calling for a state court judge to correct it.

A group of student journalists packed the front rows of the Shawnee Mission Board of Education meeting Monday as editors of student newspapers in the district expressed their concerns with draft policy language on student press rights that got a first reading last month.

The ACLU of Kansas announced this week that it had named Nadine Farid Johnson, who spent six years as a diplomat in the U.S. Department of State before moving to a role with Google in Los Angeles, as its new executive director.

“This is a fairly clear Eighth Amendment violation,” said Lauren Bonds, legal director for the ACLU of Kansas, which brought the Medicaid lawsuit. “Delayed treatment is unconstitutional.”

Last year, the ACLU went into court and sought a writ of mandamus that would force Montgomery County prosecutor Larry Markle to comply with those notification procedures. That case is currently pending.

“Looking in the court context there are very few court cases where racial bias is alleged where you have a smoking gun of racial bias. A lot of times it’s circumstantial evidence that gets you there,” Bonds said.

Grace Altenhofen, a plaintiff in the ACLU First Amendment lawsuit against the school district, told the board she had concerns with the proposed student publications policy update.