Lawsuit Alleging 1st Amendment Violations Filed Against Pennsbury

FALLSINGTON, PA — Four residents of the Pennsbury School District have filed a lawsuit against an array of district employees and appointees, saying policies on public comment at school board meetings violated their First Amendment rights.

Douglas Marshall, Simon Campbell, Robert Abrams, and Timothy Daly have all, over a period of several years, had written comments go unread or had spoken comments be removed from Pennsbury's video records of meetings, according to the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

The plaintiffs filed the suit against solicitors Peter C. Amuso and Michael P. Clarke; Director of Equity, Diversity, and Education Cherrissa Gibson; Pennsbury School Board President Christine Toy-Dragoni; former Supervisor of Communication Strategies Ann Langtry; and other school board members in their individual and official capacities.

Board Policy 903 is one of the key policies the plaintiffs take issue with. It states, among other provisions, that the solicitor present at board meetings may "interrupt or terminate a participant's statement when the statement is too lengthy, personally directed, abusive, obscene, or irrelevant." They feel that this provision has been stretched to include justification for removing comments from video records of board meetings, a practice they say violates the right to free speech.

“Comments are found in violation of the policy by anyone who hears them and thinks so," the lawsuit quotes Toy-Dragoni as saying, in response to a community member's concerns. "It is then run by our solicitors who make the decision that something is in violation.”

The lawsuit also quotes Policy 922, a new provision stating that "offensive, inappropriate, intolerant, and/or threatening speech or behavior erodes the civil, orderly, and respectful environment that the Board seeks to promote in district schools, on district property, and at district-sponsored events and activities." One count in the lawsuit seeks for a ruling affirming the plaintiffs' belief that this and Policy 903 are "unduly vague."

Some aspects of the lawsuit center on a statement by Clarke in December, on the right to free speech at board meetings.

"I know that very often during public comment people like to throw around this idea about their First Amendment rights [but] public comment does not allow and the First Amendment does not allow anyone to say anything that they want, and the law is very clear that we are allowed to set reasonable guidelines," he's quoted as saying, "... when they begin with personal attacks and they begin to talk about ‘the criminal behavior of this department’ or ‘how incompetent this one is,’ that begins to violate our policy, and we’re well within our rights to edit those or to possibly not read them in their entirety."

The plaintiffs view this statement as one of several board actions to censor their speech.

A significant portion of the lawsuit also discusses comments by Marshall, in which (among other comments at a board meeting) he spoke about "inner city violence" while criticizing the equity model, and suggested that civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had promoted "colorblindness." After this meeting, Gibson, in an email to former superintendent William J. Gretzula and Toy-Dragoni, criticized Marshall's statements as "abusive and harmful to Black students and families, as well as our community as a whole."

After discussion with solicitors and in their email chain in which Toy-Dragoni expressed agreement with Gibson, Toy-Dragoni worked with solicitors, Gibson, and Gretzula and issued an apology to the community. Langtry, in consultation with the board, is said to have removed the comments from the video record and included a written statement in the video explaining that it had been edited.

Later, the original video was reposted with a disclaimer that the posting was not a district endorsement of the views espoused.

Of several counts in the lawsuit, one includes a provision hoping the court would find that the defendants engaged in "conspiracy to violate civil rights." The plaintiffs seek "declaratory and preliminary and permanent injunctive relief against continued enforcement and maintenance of [Pennsbury's] unconstitutional customs, policies, and practices; and attorney fees and expenses," according to the suit.

Alan Gura, Endel Kolde, and Martha Astor from the D.C. non-profit Institute for Free Speech are representing the plaintiffs, as is Michael Gottlieb of Norristown. Kolde and Astor have not yet been admitted to the D.C. Bar, according to the suit.

"The District has not yet been served with this lawsuit and has no comment at this time," said Jennifer Neill, a spokesperson for the district, in response to Patch's request for comment. "We will respond appropriately through our solicitor if and when we are served."