The lawsuit against the Mountain View-Birch Tree R-III School Distict was filed this week. Goldwater Institute is representing the boy and his mother, Riley Grunden.
Joe Setyon is the senior communications manager at Goldwater Institute. He explained what happened.
“On a weekend project -- he's a very artistic guy -- he had some Dr. Pepper cans around, and he decided to glue them into the shape of a rifle, which was just kind of him being creative.”
The boy then took a picture of it and posted it on his personal Snapchat account.
“Then the school district responds by suspending him, and they demand to search his belongings, and they claim that this is cyber bullying, and that permanently goes on his school record despite the fact that they openly acknowledged that there were no threats, no violent language.”
Grunden says her son’s First Amendment rights have been violated.
“This is unconscionable—my son never hurt or threatened a single person. Instead of using common sense, our own school district treated my child like a criminal for arranging empty soda cans in a way they didn’t like,” she said.
Goldwater Institute cites two Supreme Court cases as the basis of their lawsuit.
“The Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. established that schools have limited authority to regulate off-campus speech. The Court specifically warned against allowing schools to become “24/7 censors” of student expression. Moreover, the Court’s 2023 decision in Counterman v. Colorado reinforced that the government cannot punish speech as a “true threat” without evidence the speaker could have anticipated that his expression would be perceived as threatening another person,” the firm’s press release states.
Neither standard was met here -- the student was punished solely because someone else misinterpreted his artistic expression, the firm says.
Setyon said the school investigated and found there was no credible evidence of danger.
“They still chose to punish him because they said that it had caused fear to one student. However, this violates the First Amendment, and it also violates the Missouri Constitution, which has even stronger protections for free speech."
