Judge: Jackson Schools Infringed on Educators’ Free Speech

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi’s second-largest college district had “imprecise, overbroad and unconstitutional” restrictions on educators’ freedom of speech, a choose dominated.

Circuit Choose Jess Dickinson on Tuesday ordered Jackson Public Colleges to completely cease imposing insurance policies that banned employees from contacting mother and father, the general public, the media, legislation enforcement or anybody else about points within the faculties, the Clarion Ledger reported.

“By silencing its academics, employees, staff and their organizational advocate, JPS deprives its college students, their mother and father and different events comparable to legislators and taxpayers, of necessary data obligatory to completely perceive and participate of their public training system, and meaningfully name for its enchancment the place and when wanted,” Dickinson wrote.

Jackson Federation of Lecturers, a union representing academics, paraprofessionals and different college employees, filed a criticism towards the district final yr. Insurance policies talked about within the court docket submitting had been about confidential data, employees ethics and use of social media.

WAPT-TV reported that the college district had mentioned staff, college and employees could possibly be disciplined and even fired if the superintendent decided they used social media to put up “information, paperwork, pictures or inappropriate data … which may lead to a disruption of classroom exercise.”

The district’s insurance policies blocked free speech and adversely affected the union’s potential to draw potential members, wrote Dickinson, a retired Mississippi Supreme Court docket justice who was appointed in 2020 to assist with a backlog of Hinds County court docket circumstances.

The JPS board revised the district’s insurance policies in early April, after hearings in Hinds County Circuit Court docket, in accordance with court docket paperwork. The revision made the court docket case irrelevant, mentioned officers of the district that has about 19,350 college students.

Dickinson wrote the court docket nonetheless had issues JPS may reinstate the challenged insurance policies and proceed to inform staff they will’t communicate out in sure methods or reveal data that’s “not in the perfect curiosity of the district.”

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