Because the children were too young to be protected by the First Amendment, a California judge agreed with the school district that it was right to punish a girl for posting a message with a Black Lives Matter drawing.
In court documents, Chelsea Boyle’s first-grade daughter, B.B., was punished by her teachers and principal at Viejo Elementary School in 2021 for drawing the phrase “any life” on a picture she gave to a friend. These documents were looked at by Fox News Digital as part of Boyle’s lawsuit in California.
The picture had the words “Black Lives Matter” and four round shapes in different shades of brown, beige, and yellow. The shapes were meant to reflect her and her friends. The plaintiff, B.B., who was seven years old at the time of the event, said in court that she gave the drawing to her friend to make her feel better after learning about Martin Luther King Jr.
According to court papers, the friend’s mother saw the drawing when she brought it home and emailed the school, saying she would not “tolerate any more messages given to [her] at school because of her skin color” and that she “trusted” the school to handle the problem. Court records say that Jesus Becerra, the director, talked to B.B. about the drawing and told her it was “inappropriate” and “racist.”
“It was heartbreaking to realize that this is what schools and children are subjected to and what it’s come to,” Boyle told Fox News. As punishment, B.B. wasn’t allowed to draw pictures at school, had to say sorry in front of everyone, and couldn’t have a break for two weeks.
“The drawing had a phrase similar to ‘All Lives Matter,’ a phrase that means ‘everyone matters,’ but is widely seen as racist and degrading when used toward people of color,'” U.S. Central District Court Judge David Carter said in his ruling. Even though the judge says “B.B.’s intentions were innocent,” he “put a lot of weight on the fact that the students were in first grade.” This is why Judge Carter decided that the drawing “is not protected by the First Amendment.”
On behalf of her daughter, Boyle sued the Capistrano Unified School District (CUSD) in 2023 after learning about what happened. She said it was an infringement on her girls’ First Amendment rights.
A woman named Boyle said she had no idea what had happened to her daughter until another parent in the child’s class told her. Boyle told her daughter about what happened after she heard about it.
“My first question was, why didn’t you tell me about it?” Boyle wrote to Fox News Digital. “She said: ‘Because I got in so much trouble at school, I didn’t want to get in trouble at home.'”
Boyle said of the school director, “He made her say sorry in front of everyone.” “She was confused. She went back into the classroom and told that other little girl she was sorry again, still confused.” She said, “That’s OK,” even though the other little girl didn’t understand.
In this case, Judge Carter agreed with the school board and respected the teachers at Viejo Elementary School.
“A parent might second-guess Becerra’s [the principal’s] conclusion, but his decision to discipline B.B. belongs to him, not the federal courts,” he said.
Boyle thought it was “weird” that Judge Carter believes “school districts or schools should have unrestricted access to be able to discipline our children based on free speech.”
“They get to make the decision and punish them and this was kept secret from me,” she stated. “As a parent, I don’t like secrets.”
The Boyles are appealing, and Caleb R. Trotter, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, said that the case will now go to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“There is a concern over whether perhaps future courts or even future school districts would look to that and say, ‘Well, this one school district got away with it, so we can too,’” Trotter told Fox News Online. “That combined with just the outrageousness of the punishment in the situation itself, made this a much more important case kind of overnight just due to those implications that could occur nationally.”
“It can’t really be squared with the Supreme Court precedent at all,” he stated. “It’s maddening and, fortunately for Chelsea and B.B., it’s also unconstitutional.”
Carter paid special attention to how old the kids were when he made his decision.
“Younger students may be more sensitive than older students, so their educational experience may be more affected when they receive messages based on a protected characteristic,” he said. “In the same way, first graders are easy to influence. The chaos can spread to other students, which would make it harder for even more students to learn.
In this case, Trotter said that the two girls were innocent because B.B. was trying to be nice to her friend by drawing.
“What especially irks me is they created the entire situation themselves by introducing first-graders to very contentious, controversial topics about race, and then B.B, understandably, responded to that in an ideal way, trying to be friendly and inclusive,” he added. “To turn around and punish her because she strayed from the current racial ideology view from one side of the debate, it’s just unconscionable.”
“Even the student who received this drawing was never offended because she didn’t understand that there was an offense to take and that truly, this was the most innocent situation,” he told Fox News Online.
Judge Carter concluded that he thought the two girls had probably moved on from what happened. Boyle disagrees with this.
The judge said in this decision, “B.B. and M.C. [the friend] have definitely moved on from this incident that happened three years ago.” “B.B. said that the drawing didn’t make their friendship worse. They taught us how to move on in a very important way.
However, Boyle replied that her daughter still can’t get over what happened and that the event has “irreparably harmed” her daughter.
“She has had severe anxiety and panic attacks that have been crippling, and they haven’t stopped,” she said, adding that the Boyle family had to leave California because of how they were treated by the school district and the town.
“I have been contacted by numerous families within that district and all over the country that these same sort of things have happened to them, which has pushed me along to continue this fight,” she added.
Ryan Burris, who is in charge of marketing and public engagement for CUSD, told Fox News Digital that the district usually doesn’t talk about cases that are still being argued, so this case was an exception.
