Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a free speech dispute stemming from an Indiana high school’s refusal to let a student anti-abortion rights group post meeting flyers bearing the message “Defund Planned Parenthood.”
The case centered on the limits of student speech and the authority of public schools to restrict messages that might appear to carry the school’s endorsement. A lower court ruled in favor of the school, and the justices’ decision not to take up the appeal leaves that ruling in place.
Justice Samuel Alito dissented from the court’s decision, saying the Supreme Court should have used the case to “clarify the relationship between” a 1988 ruling on school-sponsored student expression and the court’s broader government-speech precedents.
The dispute began in 2021, when a Noblesville High School freshman identified in court records as E.D. started Noblesville Students for Life, a local chapter of Students for Life of America. The group was one of more than 70 student-initiated, student-run clubs at the school that are not tied to the curriculum.
School policy permits student clubs to post flyers in common areas to advertise meeting times and locations, but the materials must first be approved by an administrator. According to court filings, the school bars posters containing content it considers “political” or “disruptive.”
After winning approval to establish the club, E.D. moved to organize its first meeting and submitted two proposed flyers to the school’s assistant principal. The templates, taken from the Students for Life of America website, included photos of students holding signs that said “Defund Planned Parenthood” and “I am the Pro-Life Generation.”
The assistant principal denied approval of the posters and told E.D. that they should only include the club’s name and information about the meeting location, date and time. E.D., accompanied by her mother, Lisa Duell, then met with the school’s dean about the flyers, and they were told they could not include the phrase “Defund Planned Parenthood.”
The school’s principal then decided to suspend Noblesville Students for Life’s approval because of concerns that it was not student-led and student-driven, given the participation of E.D.’s mother, and because she refused to comply with instructions for meeting flyers. The club was reinstated in 2022 and remained active.
E.D.’s parents and Noblesville Students for Life filed a lawsuit against the school, arguing that their First Amendment rights were violated when the school refused to allow E.D.’s proposed posters.
But a federal district court ruled in favor of the school, finding that the flyers “could reasonably be perceived to bear the imprimatur of the school.” The district court applied a 1988 decision from the Supreme Court in the case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, in which the high court held that a school can exercise “editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”
“It would be reasonable for parents and other members of the public entering NHS for sporting events, student concerts, theater performances, parent-teacher conferences, or any other reason who observed such flyers displayed on school walls to erroneously attribute any political messaging they contained to the school district or the school itself,” U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker wrote in a 2024 decision.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit upheld the district court’s decision, finding that students, parents or visitors to the school could view the posters as reflecting the school’s endorsement.
“This is not a case about tolerating private student speech,” the court found. “To the contrary, E.D. was permitted to wear her pro-life shirt to school and hand out her flyers to students at the activities fair. Instead, it is a case about whether the school must lend its resources (here, literally its walls) — and, by extension, its authority — to disseminate student messages.”
Additionally, the 7th Circuit said the school’s restriction on political content in flyers aimed to maintain “neutrality on matters of political controversy.” Allowing school walls to be covered with competing political messages would “divert attention from the business of learning,” the panel found.
E.D., represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative judicial group, appealed to the Supreme Court. In a filing to the justices, they argued that the Supreme Court’s 1988 decision has been used by schools and universities to censor speech they deem controversial.
“That can’t be the right rule for our nurseries of democracy,” the plaintiffs wrote, adding that the federal appeals courts have adopted different views on the breadth of student-speech protections. In a landmark 1969 decision in the case Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court held that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
They warned that “public schools and educators increasingly engage in political advocacy and indoctrination, heightening the risk that students who dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy will be censored.”
But lawyers for Noblesville High School argued that the case is not about a student’s expression at school, and instead addresses whether a school “must lend its walls to students to disseminate political messages.”
Students are free to express their political views through other channels, they wrote in a filing, but said the school had the authority to restrict political content on materials posted on its walls.
