Photo: U.S. District Court Winchester Division, East Tennessee
A high school student from Tennessee has filed a lawsuit against his school district and several administrators after he was suspended for three days for posting memes about his principal on Instagram.
Last summer, the 17-year-old, identified as "I.P." in the lawsuit, posted three memes poking light-hearted fun at Tullahoma High School Principal Jason Quick. One image showed Quick holding a box of vegetables with the words "like a sister but not a sister <33" over the box. Above Quick's head, he wrote "my brotha" with a flame emoji on either side and "on god."
The second meme depicted Quick as an anime cat with whiskers, cat ears, and wearing a dress. The third meme features "Quick's head superimposed on a hand-drawn cartoon meant to resemble a character from the online game Among Us." At the bottom, the student wrote, "NOOO JASON DONT LE AVE ME."
School officials saw the images and suspended the student for three days, citing a district policy prohibiting students from posting anything that may cause "the embarrassment, demeaning, or discrediting of any student or staff." The policy applies to posts made at school or while the student is off-campus.
The lawsuit claims that the school's policy violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
"This case is about a thin-skinned high school principal defying the First Amendment and suspending a student for lampooning the principal on the student's Instagram page even though the posts caused no disruption at school," the suit states.
"The First Amendment bars public school employees from acting as a round-the-clock board of censors over student expression. The Supreme Court has been clear: Unless a student's off-campus expression causes a substantial disruption at school, the job of policing their speech falls to parents, not the government," the lawsuit continues.
Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told Fox News that the suspension "teaches a very dangerous lesson to kids about what America and our Constitution is about."
"It has been part of American culture since the founding to criticize and satirize those in power," he said. "It teaches a very dangerous lesson to kids about what America and our Constitution is about if they're taught from a young age that if they criticize or satirize somebody in power that, they can get in trouble for it."