This story is either a few weeks or a few years old depending on how you look at it, but the lesson it offers is timeless. It's a case where Black Lives Matter and the left-leaning, DEI-pushing tendencies of public schools have combined to make innocent children and their parents miserable.

Back in 2021, a first grade teacher in Orange County, California was giving a lesson on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr to her class of six and seven year-olds. As part of the lesson, the teacher brought up Black Lives Matter. One of the girls in the class, a 7-year-old white girl described only as B.B., felt bad to learn that some of her classmates lives didn't matter. So she drew a picture with the words "Black Lives Mater" (she misspelled it) and below it four faces of different colors to represent some of her classmates of different races. In between she added the words "any life."

B.B. gave the drawing to a black friend in the class as a kind of symbol of concern and inclusion. The girl, who we'll call M.C., accepted the picture in the spirit it was offered, thanked B.B. and took it home in her backpack.

The friend took the drawing home, where her mother found it in her backpack and fired off an email to the principal. “My husband and I will not tolerate any more messages given to our daughter at school because of her skin color,” she wrote.

Now at this point, it's worth saying that I don't think M.C.s mom did anything wrong. She was concerned that her daughter was being singled out for her race in class and wanted to make sure that wasn't happening. If your child is the only black student (or the only student of any demographic) you understandably don't want them being used as some kind of object lesson for the class. You want them treated like everyone else, which is sort of the whole point of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech. 

The real problem wasn't the email from the parent it was the absurd over-reaction of the school. This comes from a legal brief filed in the case:

Upon finding the picture at home, M.C.’s mother contacted the school’s principal, Defendant-Appellee Jesus Becerra, to express concern that her daughter was being singled out for her race. After investigating, Becerra expressed that writing “any life” on the drawing was inconsistent with values taught in the school but acknowledged that B.B.’s motives were “innocent.” Because M.C.’s parents agreed that B.B. innocently drew the picture, they informed Becerra that they did not want her punished.

Declining to heed M.C.’s parents’ wishes, Becerra punished B.B. for her drawing, deeming it “racist” and “inappropriate.” First, he instructed B.B. to apologize to M.C. for the drawing. Upon being apologized to, M.C. expressed confusion about what B.B. was apologizing for. B.B. shared M.C.’s confusion about the need for an apology but did as she was told. Second, Becerra banned B.B. from drawing and giving pictures to classmates while at school—a particularly harsh punishment for a first-grade child who loved to draw. Third, after receiving her punishment from Becerra and returning to class, B.B.’s teachers told her that she was not permitted to participate in recess for two weeks. During those two weeks where she was banned from recess, B.B. was forced to sit on a bench and watch her classmates play without her. B.B.’s parents were not informed about the drawing or punishment until about a year later.

So no sensible person involved in this wanted punishment or an apology. Not the other girl. Not her mother. But the idiot principal decided that a 7-year-old was sending coded "all lives matter" messages to a classmate and forced her to apologize and then punished her.

B.B.'s mother, Chelsea Boyle learned about the situation a whole year later from friends and then asked her daughter about it. She sent an angry email to the school and then another, calmer one asking for an apology to her daughter. All that was needed here was for the aforementioned idiot principal to admit he'd gotten carried away and apologize. But of course he couldn't do that. So, eventually, Chelsea Boyle decided to file a lawsuit. 

She lost the case initially and then reached out to the Pacific Legal Foundation to help her with an appeal. That appeal is now going before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At issue is the lower court's decision that no harm was done because first graders don't have First Amendment rights, an idea that PLF takes issue with.

“The whole situation was nuts,” said the attorney, Caleb Trotter, citing the first-grader’s punishment for the drawing. But it was his concern over the judge’s ruling that worried him more, a legal opinion he summed up as, “Well, they’re really young, so they have no First Amendment rights.”

“As absurd as this case is, if that decision is allowed to stand … it is a precedent,” he said. “If that view is allowed to survive and spread, the speech rights of countless elementary students around the country could be at risk. That was what really concerned me.”

The judge's decision in the case was premised on the idea that there is no downside to idiot principals regulating the speech of children.

“An elementary school … is not a marketplace of ideas,” he wrote. “Thus, the downsides of regulating speech there is not as significant as it is in high schools, where students are approaching voting age and controversial speech could spark conducive conversation.” 

As for the punishment, “a parent might second-guess (the principal’s) conclusion, but his decision to discipline B.B. belongs to him, not the federal courts.”

Would it have been too much for this judge to simply say that this discipline made no sense and should never have been given. Sure it may be the principal's decision but the principal in this case was wrong. All the parents wanted here was an apology but he couldn't manage that.

It could be a year before this is resolved but B.B. and her parents seem to have some legal precedent on their side:

B.B. has a rich body of law on her side. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said that free-speech rights are not contingent upon age. In the pivotal case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, upholding the right of students to wear black armbands in a peaceful protest against the war in Vietnam, the Court held:

“State-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students … are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect,” the Court found.

The entire story is an object lesson in how knee-jerk DEI ruins everything. It made the parent of a black child fear her kid was being singled out by race. It resulted in a white child being punished for an innocent act of kindness toward a classmate. It apparently prompted the school to keep what happened from the parents. And it eventually resulted in a court ruling that students have no right to offer thoughts on their own indoctrination. At some point you just have to step back and admit this isn't helping.

JUST IN: California judge rules that teachers were right to punish a 7-year-old girl who wrote ‘ANY LIFE’ over a Black Lives Matter drawing because ‘she’s too young to have First Amendment rights.’

The first grader at Viejo Elementary in Orange County was banned from recess and… pic.twitter.com/SVdsz50ITJ

— Unlimited L's (@unlimited_ls) July 18, 2024