Parents Defending Education v. Olentangy Local School District Board of Education

Olentangy School District seeks to compel all students to use another student’s chosen pronouns while chatting in the hallway, regardless of a student’s religious, moral, or philosophical objections. But the discomfort or personal offense of one student cannot justify forcing another student to violate his own conscience.

Parents Defending Education is a K-12 advocacy group with parent and student members in the school district. It sued to challenge Olentangy’s “anti-harassment” pronoun policies as violating the students’ First Amendment rights by suppressing their protected speech and compelling them to speak contrary to their own beliefs. A federal district court disagreed, holding that under the landmark Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the school could regulate pronoun use, even outside the classroom environment, because using incorrect pronouns invades the rights of gender-nonconforming students to have a “safe and civil learning environment.”

On October 2, 2023, FIRE and the Manhattan Institute filed an amicus brief in support of the parents group with the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. As the brief explains, nothing in Tinker’s invasion of “the rights of others” exception allows schools to regulate innocuous, everyday interactions between students in the hallway. And nothing in Tinker justifies compelling student speech, which violates another landmark Supreme Court case, West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette. That is particularly true given that Olentangy’s “anti-harassment” policies fail to satisfy the high threshold set forth by the Supreme Court in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, which explains how to regulate student harassment without falling afoul of the First Amendment. FIRE and the Manhattan Institute urge the Sixth Circuit to protect K-12 student speech, even when their fellow students may not like what they have to say.