Pacific Northwest students stand up for their rights.

Gender & School Sports

Are the official athletic teams in your school co-ed? Can girls play football with boys? Baseball? How about wrestling?

It used to be that boys played on the official school team and girls were cheerleaders, played in the band, or just sat in the audience. It's not like that anymore. Today, the law says that if a girl wants to go out for a sport and there is not an equivalent team for girls she must be allowed to go out for the boys' team. And if she makes it, she's on. Girls have this equal opportunity thanks to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article 1, section 20 of Oregon's Constitution, which give all persons equal treatment and privileges.

However, girls are not always given the chance to play the sport of their choice...

Baseball
Kimberly Phillips grew up playing baseball -- not softball, baseball. When she moved with her family from California to Eugene, she expected to continue to play baseball. But, in the summer of 1994 when she tried to sign up for baseball, Kidsports, a local non-profit sports program in Eugene, told her that girls couldn't play baseball, only softball.

It took the involvement of the ACLU, the superintendent of Eugene schools; and all the boys on her team ( who voted unanimously to let Kimberly play), to get Kidsports to change its ways. Finally, Kidsports agreed to let girls play baseball -- and Kimberly made the team.

Wrestling
The ACLU has also helped girls get on the boys' wrestling team. Like Kimberly, these girls were qualified to make the team -- their grades were high enough, they were the right age and they met the physical requirements. But, they were girls.

When we learned that high schools in Banks, Portland, Springfield and Sutherlin were not allowing qualified girls to go out for wrestling, we got involved on behalf of the girl wrestlers. The school officials felt it was inappropriate for girls and boys to practice and compete together in a contact sport such as wrestling;  they also felt that wrestling was too violent for girls.  However, courts have consistently ruled that the government, in this case public high schools, must allow girls to participate in contact sports with boys when there is not an equal girls' team.
So far, when schools learn that their policy does not protect girls, but does violate the constitution, they do the right thing... and girls wrestle.

Student Drug Testing

It was 1991.  James Acton was a seventh grader at Washington Grade School in Vernonia and, like many students, he wanted to go out for football.  But in order to play football, or any other sport, James, and every student in the Vernonia School District who wanted to go out for a sport, had to submit to random drug testing.  Even though James was not suspected of using drugs and had never been in trouble at school, school officials said he would have to pee into a cup so they could test his urine for evidence of illegal drugs. 

James and his family thought this was a violation of his right, under the Oregon and U.S. Constitutions, to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.  They also felt the mandatory, suspicionless drug testing violated his privacy. The ACLU agreed and we sued the Vernonia School District on behalf of James and his parents.

The school district argued that testing student athletes for drugs was necessary to ensure their safety. The first judge to hear the case, in federal court in Portland, agreed with the school. But when the ACLU took James' case to the next level, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that court agreed with us.  The appellate court agreed that making James and other athletes take a drug test without any reason to suspect drug use violated the federal Fourth Amendment.

Finally, Acton v. Vernonia School District ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit Court's decision. The highest court in the country ruled that, even though urine testing for drugs is a search and seizure, the school district's argument that student athletes' safety was more important than James' right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure was correct, and the policy of making student athletes undergo random, suspicionless drug testing was permitted by the federal constitution.

The ACLU still believes that suspicionless drug testing is unconstitutional and wrong under the Oregon Bill of Rights.  We look forward to the opportunity to prove that random, suspicionless drug testing of students violates the Oregon Constitution's prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.

Cyber-liberties

Whether you have your own home page or can barely click a mouse, you probably realize that the internet is here to stay. As the internet's role in school, work, and life in general grows, civil liberties concerns in cyberspace also grow.

No one owns the internet, but that doesn't prevent the government from trying to control it. As with other forms of expression, the First Amendment gives you the right to say whatever you want online and on your home page, as long as you obey all the laws that govern copyrights, libel, etc.

Paul Kim was a senior at Newport High School in Washington State when he created a home page that spoofed the school's official home page. The spoof page, which contained satirical information about the high school, clearly stated that the site was a spoof and was not the official web site of Newport High School.

However, Newport High's principal didn't think the spoof was funny, especially a section entitled "Favorite Topics of Newport High School Students," which was about sex. In fact, she was so dismayed that she revoked the school's endorsement of Paul as a National Merit finalist, and contacted all seven of the colleges he had applied to. And she did all this without ever telling him.

The ACLU stepped in when Paul, who had a 3.8 GPA and thus had a strong chance of admittance to the country's best schools, found out what happened. With the help of the ACLU of Washington, Paul finally received an official apology from the school district, in which the district acknowledged that the action taken against him was a mistake.

Though Paul's situation worked out, everything about the internet changes all the time. So, keep in mind that some of this information about the internet may no longer be valid. Be sure to check National and Oregon ACLU's web sites often to keep current with cyber-liberties -- and all civil liberties.

Student Expression

Hi-Spots is the "official" student newspaper of Tigard High School.  Class of '92 Tigard High School senior Scott Barcik thought that students who were not the type to become involved with the official school paper also needed a way to make their voices heard.  So he and some friends created an alternative school newspaper.  Remembers Scott, "I thought it would be a way to get out the opinions of people in school who wouldn't normally speak out... [to] allow people to express their views anonymously."

Low-Spots was produced by Scott and a friend in their own time, on their home computers.  However, some friends passed out copies of Low-Spots at school, where the principal soon got hold of one. The principal, when he called Scott into his office, told him that the paper was inappropriate and unacceptable; he was really upset about the "offensive" language, too.  As a result, Scott and his friend were suspended from school for seven days.

In the meantime, Hi-Spots editor Shannon Kasten felt that Low-Spots provided an important outlet for students to voice their frustration with some decisions made by school officials, and planned an editorial in support of the underground paper. School officials were about as thrilled with that idea as they were with Low-Spots, and Shannon had to pull her editorial. To make matters worse, the school district then adopted new regulations that required, "...all publications distributed to the student body or in school have administrative approval."  In other words, Hi-Spots couldn't be published without school approval of its content, and Scott couldn't pass out copies of Low-Spots to other students, even though he produced it on his own time with his own computer.

That's when the ACLU came in. We agreed with Shannon and Scott that the school was engaging in censorship, which is a violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article 1, section 8 of the Oregon Constitution. On behalf of Scott, Shannon and other students, the ACLU sued the Tigard-Tualatin School District, charging school officials with unconstitutionally censoring students.

We won, but only some of the battle. The Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the school was wrong to punish Scott for his underground paper, and to prevent Shannon from publishing her editorial. But, since the students involved all graduated by the time the case went to trial, the Court ruled that we did not have grounds to challenge the school's policy of requiring prior review of all student publications. Establishing the right of students to be free from prior review of their publications is an issue we hope to get another chance to take on soon.