Lawsuit accuses St. Louis Public School Board for illegally banning attorney from meetings • Missouri Independent

An education attorney filed a federal lawsuit Monday against St. Louis Public School Board, alleging it illegally banned him from meetings and district property.

Chester Asher, founder of the Coalition for STL Kids, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Missouri with the help of the First Amendment Clinic at Washington University in St. Louis. He claims that the ban violated his constitutional rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Named as defendants in the case are the school district, the board and board president, Antionette Cousins.

According to the lawsuit, St. Louis Public Schools Board of Education Asher that he had been warned about being “disrespectful” while speaking at public meetings before issuing a six-month ban. While the ban started in March and ended in September, Asher said the lawsuit is “not just about me and my individual six-month suspension.

“It’s about teachers, parents and others telling me they fear retribution if they speak up at board meetings about what concerns them,” Asher told The Independent.

Asher, who has been a regular attendee of board meetings for two years, has often spoken during public comment sessions, criticizing the board and administration over budget decisions, staff turnover and test scores that show the majority of black students in the district are reading below grade level, among other things. problems.

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Case law, the lawsuit states, supports a “deep national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be unfettered, robust and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes uncomfortably sharp attacks on government. and public officials.”

Such speech “may not be censored because it is critical of officials, employees or policies, even if such criticism is expressed in ways that are unpleasant or offensive,” according to the lawsuit. “Restrictions on speech in limited public forums must be both reasonable in light of the purpose of the forum and viewpoint neutral.”

The board’s public comment rules require speakers to remain “respectful” and refrain from “speaking disparagingly of anyone,” the lawsuit states. Those restrictions, along with a ban on “personal attacks,” are “viewpoint-discriminatory restrictions on speech and are unconstitutional on their face,” the lawsuit said.

Among the examples cited in the lawsuit of how Asher’s speech was impassioned yet protected include criticism of the district for hosting the U.S. Secretary of Education at an urban public school where the majority of students read and do math below grade level.

“You all had the audacity to bring the Secretary of Education to a school where 85% of the kids can’t read at grade level. Did you all tell them that? Where 95% of the kids are not at grade level for math. . . . Are you out of your mind ?” Asher said at a September 2023 board meeting.

Asher later added, “We come to the board of education and hear nothing, not a damn thing about education and literacy and reading for our kids. Stop it.”

St. Louis Public Schools were closed Monday due to the weather. An email sent to Cousins ​​was not immediately returned, nor was a phone message to a St. Louis law firm involved in drafting the school board’s letter to Asher.