Oklahoma’s education board has revoked the license of a former teacher who drew national attention during surging book-ban efforts across the U.S. in 2022 when she covered part of her classroom bookshelf in red tape with the words “Books the state didn’t want you to read.”
The decision Thursday went against a judge who had advised the Oklahoma Board of Education not to revoke the license of Summer Boismier, who had also put in her high school classroom a QR code of the Brooklyn Public Library’s catalogue of banned books.
An attorney for Boismier, who now works at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City, told reporters after the board meeting that they would seek to overturn the decision.
I’m not a lawyer so could someone explain to me how laws like this don’t immediately fail a prior restraint test?
Probably because they are an employee of the government, not a private publisher. (They’re also not a publisher at all.)
Does posting to a blog count as publishing? I don’t feel like old definitions of “private publisher” are as useful as they used to be. Public schools are such a quagmire of conflicting ideals on the best of days. Don’t put up a flier for an unapproved study club, but CocaCola logos everywhere…
I think it does, but that’s not what’s at issue here. She put it up as a poster in her classroom.
I wonder if she coulda kept her job if (instead of a poster in the classroom) she waited just outside the school grounds to hand fliers out to kids like the evangelicals do. Or would they have said something about her “representing the school” outside of work? I guess I wouldn’t be surprised either way.