The First Amendment rights of students in the Mat-Su Borough School District came under attack by district officials after students voiced opposition to the district’s conservative school board, a lawsuit filed last week alleges.
The lawsuit was brought by members of the district’s Student Advisory Board — high school students Ben Kolendo and Quinlen Schachle. It is the second such lawsuit filed in the last three weeks and argues that the Mat-Su Borough School District and its officials infringed on their constitutional rights through a series of investigations and rules aimed at limiting student outcry against the school board.
“Accountability is a cornerstone of any democratic institution, hence why this lawsuit has become a necessity, to hold those who have misused power and privilege accountable,” said Schachle, the president of the Student Advisory Body, in a prepared statement. “Students should have every right to exercise their constitutional freedoms, and any sort of violation or interference of these rights by elected officials must be firmly condemned.”
The lawsuit was brought by the Northern Justice Project, which worked with the ACLU of Alaska to file a separate lawsuit challenging the district’s decision to ban 56 books.
Tensions have been rising between Mat-Su students and their school board in recent months, highlighted when the board voted to sharply diminish students’ role in the school board deliberations after Kolendo, the student representative on the school board, questioned the board’s conservative majority over its book-banning policy.
Until that decision, Kolendo — and decades of student advisors before him — had an advisory vote on the board and was allowed to participate in conversations.
The meeting where that decision was made drew a massive outpouring of support for the student representative position. However, the School Board members saw it differently. They directed school officials to investigate the students and their teacher advisors to see if teachers or school resources supported or encouraged the protest.
The investigation found they didn’t, but the latest lawsuit argues that the investigation was in retaliation to the students expressing their opinions against the school board and was intended to chill further speech. The lawsuit says Kolendo, Schachle and other students left the meetings feeling intimidated.
Things didn’t stop there. When students organized a walkout on Oct. 31, 2023, Assistant Superintendent Justin Ainsworth allegedly told students there “can’t be anything political with the walkout” and that no political signage would be allowed during the walkout. They were also explicitly told they couldn’t carry a sign reading “Stand for Students, Vote Him Out,” referencing Ole Larson, the GOP Gov. Mike Dunleavy-endorsed board member who has spearheaded much of its right-wing initiatives.
When a student was spotted carrying such a sign, the lawsuit alleges a school official directly ordered them to put it down.
Then, when students planned another protest for election day on Nov. 7, the district announced that they were banned from holding them at Colony High School, Career Tech High School, Redington Jr./Sr. High School or any other school that would be a polling place.
A district-wide email sent ahead of the protest even quoted directly from Tinker v. Des Moines — the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that found that students do, in fact, have a right to free speech at schools — arguing that the limitations on speech were justified.
“While students ‘do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate,’ those rights are subject to reasonable School District rules related to time, manner, and place and, further, must not cause disruption or be reasonably likely to create disruption on school grounds,” explained the email to families, detailing a plan for officials to move the students off campus and monitor them. “Once at the off-campus location adjacent to school property, students will be free to exercise their right to protest but will not be allowed to protest on election day at any time on those three campuses.”
Alaska election law does prohibit campaigning within 200 feet of polling places, which is what school administrators used as justification to force students off campus for their walkout on election day. Savannah Fletcher, the legal counsel for the students, said that was an overly broad decision that was again aimed at limiting speech against the school board.
“The issue here is that the school used that as an excuse to go far beyond a 200-foot limitation and to prohibit students’ ability to protest anywhere on campus,” she emailed The Alaska Current. “When Ben and Quin were planning to protest, they confirmed that they would be more than 200 feet from the polling location on campus, but they were still walked off campus entirely. Schools are allowed to have reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on certain forms of speech, but this blanket restriction went too far.”
Why it matters
While most other school boards in Alaska have largely shied away from becoming mired in the right-wing culture wars, the Mat-Su school board has launched headfirst into it with plenty of controversial decisions passed under the guise of protecting the kids.
Kids speaking out, however, challenges that narrative.
The school board directed school officials to investigate students and their teachers for speech that challenged them, and school officials took steps to limit or chill further speech. That’s the core issue at the heart of this case, challenging the right established in Tinker that students do not “shed their constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
The district argues that at least some of its actions around the walkout protests were justified in maintaining an orderly learning environment for students. However, that doesn’t precisely explain the school officials’ decisions to limit what could be said at those demonstrations directly by targeting messaging about school board member Larson.
This lawsuit argues that these actions have endangered students’ fundamental rights to free speech. The lawsuit argues that allowing a school board to lean on the administration to put a lid on students ought to be worrying, no matter who’s involved.
“This lawsuit is not only about my individual rights but also the rights of all current and future students of this school district,” Kolendo said in the news release. “My goal is to set a precedent that students’ rights are protected to allow for an educational environment where diverse opinions are encouraged, and opinions can be expressed without censorship.”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.