Bell v. itawamba county school board ruling

Identity of Speakers

• Taylor Bell

  Student
  Other

  Taylor Bell is a high school student who posted rap lyrics to his personal Facebook page.

  Table of Contents Show

  • Identity of Speakers
  • Additional Information

Additional Information

• Incident Nature:
  Social media
  
• Incident Political Orientation:
  Neither
• Incident Responses:
  Student sanctioned
  
• Incident Status:
  Dismissed
  Appealed
  
• No protest Occured
• Did not involve Speech Codes

Summary

On January 5, 2011, Taylor Bell, a high school student, posted rap lyrics to his personal Facebook page. The lyrics accused two teachers at his school of misconduct with female students. The lyrics also included statements that could reasonably be construed as threats against the teachers. After being questioned about the lyrics by school officials, Bell posted a finalized version to YouTube. Shortly thereafter, school officials suspended Hall for seven days and required him to attend the alternative school for the remainder of the nine-week grading period. The school board denied his appeal and upheld his suspension. Bell sued the school board, alleging that his suspension based on the lyrics violated his First Amendment rights. The District Court ruled on summary judgment favor of the school board, but a divided panel of the 5th Circuit reversed. Finally, the 5th Circuit ruled en banc that the suspension did not violate Bell’s First Amendment rights. Importantly, the Court found that the Tinker framework applied even though Bell made his statements off campus. They reasoned that Tinker applies when a student intentionally directs speech to the school community that is reasonably understood to threaten, harass, or intimidate a teacher. The Court found that Bell’s speech met this threshold.

799 F.3d 379 (5th Cir. 2015)

In August 2011, Taylor Bell, then a high school senior at Itawamba Agricultural High school, recorded a rap song that accused two coaches at the school of engaging in sexual misconduct with female classmates and friends of Bell’s. Bell shared the video, which used vulgar language and contemplated that the coaches might face retaliatory violence, with his Facebook friends and posted it on YouTube. After learning of the video, the school’s principal and the district’s superintendent accused Bell of making up the allegations. Bell was suspended and later sent to an alternative school. He appealed the disciplinary ruling to the school board and lost, and filed a federal lawsuit alleging First Amendment violations. A federal district court upheld the punishment, saying that off-campus student speech can be censored or punished if the speech causes a substantial disruption of school activity, essentially expanding the 1969 ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District to apply to both on- and off-campus speech.

The SPLC filed an amicus brief in defense of Bell, writing that, while in poor taste, his speech — “an attempt to engage the public’s attention on a matter of grave concern, the sexual harassment of schoolchildren by educators” — did not cause a substantial disruption to the school. The SPLC’s brief, which was written with the help of attorney Scott Sternberg, warned that the district court’s “overbroad” decision could be used to punish well-meaning criticism of school officials purely for the sake of image control, including investigative or editorial journalistic work. In addition, the SPLC disagreed with the district court’s expansion of Tinker, writing that students need a safe space in which to criticize the actions of school officials. Finally, the SPLC brief argued that because the school has the job of educating students on issues such as free speech, it is against their mission to deny them the right to criticize public officials.

In December 2014, a panel of three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down the district court’s ruling and issued a summary judgement in Bell’s favor. Two out of three judges ruled that the song did not cause “substantial disruption” at school. 

The court decided to rehear Bell’s case in February 2015. In August 2015, the court ruled in favor of the Mississippi school district. The court affirmed the district court’s ruling that the school administrators reasonably understood the speech to be threatening, harassing and intimidating the teachers, and that the song caused a “substantial disruption” at school. Read the August 2015 ruling.

In November 2015, the attorneys for Bell petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s decision, but were denied review in February 2016. Read the petition to the Supreme Court.