Moms for Liberty Gets Win in School Board Case

BY Jim Saunders, The News Service of Florida

TALLAHASSEE — A federal appeals court recently backed a chapter of the group Moms for Liberty in a constitutional challenge to Brevard County School Board policies that placed restrictions on speakers at board meetings.

A panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said policies targeted at “abusive,” “obscene” and “personally directed” speech violated the First Amendment. The panel overturned a decision by U.S. District Judge Roy Dalton.

“For many parents, school board meetings are the front lines of the most meaningful part of local government — the education of their children,” said Tuesday’s opinion, written by Judge Britt Grant and joined fully by Judge Barbara Lagoa and partly by Judge Charles Wilson. “And sometimes speaking at these meetings is the primary way parents interact with their local leaders or communicate with other community members. No one could reasonably argue that this right is unlimited, but neither is the government’s authority to restrict it.”

The opinion came after school boards in various parts of Florida and the country have become battlegrounds during the past few years about contentious issues such as restricting or eliminating access to certain school-library books.

The Brevard County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a conservative group, and individual plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in 2021 alleging that school-board policies chilled speech at meetings. Wilson, who dissented on one part of Tuesday’s majority opinion, wrote that the case stemmed from incidents that occurred from Jan. 19, 2021, to Oct. 26, 2021.

The majority opinion said the government “has relatively broad power to restrict speech” in what are known as limited public forums, such as school board meetings. But it said that “power is not unlimited.”

“Speech restrictions must still be reasonable, viewpoint-neutral, and clear enough to give speakers notice of what speech is permissible,” Grant wrote. “The board’s policies for public participation at board meetings did not live up to those standards.”

The majority opinion said, for example, that the school board policies did not include a definition of “abusive” speech and that then-board Chairwoman Misty Belford effectively interpreted it to address what was considered “unacceptable” speech.

“At one meeting, for example, she interrupted a speaker who criticized the board’s COVID-19 masking policy as a ‘simple ploy to silence our opposition to this evil LGBTQ agenda,’” the majority opinion said. “Belford quickly stopped the speaker, who had not yelled, screamed, or otherwise caused a disruption. In her affidavit (in the lawsuit), Belford explained that she interrupted him because his ‘characterization of people as ‘evil’ was abusive.’ ,,, No one likes to be called evil, but it is not ‘abusive’ to use that term. Restrictions that bar offensive or otherwise unwelcome speech are impermissible, regardless of the forum in which the government seeks to impose them.”

As another example, the appeals court said the policies did not include a definition of “obscene.” It said the school board “used its obscenity policy to bar protected speech, and it did so in a way that impeded the purpose of a school board meeting.”

As an example, the opinion said a Moms for Liberty member was interrupted at a school-board meeting while reading from a book that was in an elementary-school library. The book included a description of a sexual encounter and a profanity.

“It would be difficult, if not impossible, for speakers to adequately air their concerns about a particular book without informing both the board and the community about what that book says,” Grant wrote. “Describing the content of a book is not as potent as reading its words — nor is it as informative. And it is remarkable for the board to suggest that this speech can be prohibited in a school board meeting because it is inappropriate for children when it came directly from a book that is available to children in their elementary school library.”

Wilson dissented on part of the opinion that addressed a policy about speech “personally” directed at other people. That policy was revised during the legal battle, and Wilson said he would find the current policy constitutional.