Districts and schools can face harsh criticism from parents, students and community members. Often times such comments can go viral causing conflict within the school or the community. As a result, officials often make the mistake of selectively deleting comments or blocking users from their official sites.

Amidst all the drama surrounding the case of the praying coach – Kennedy v. Bremerton School District – was an important free-speech question: when does a public employee engage in protected personal expression versus unprotected government speech?

In the persistent battle over issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity, public schools are frequently the battlegrounds. Tennessee public schools are no exception, and school officials have wrestled for years with such issues, particularly as they relate to transgender students. Conflicting legal authority now creates even more uncertainly over what to do in those typically difficult situations.

Public school officials generally cannot punish students for off-campus social media posts, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case involving a student punished for venting her frustration on Snapchat for not making the varsity cheerleading squad.

Prayer in school has always been a controversial topic. Throughout the last century, public schools have transitioned from mandatory bible readings to a prohibition on public prayer at the beginning of a graduation ceremony. In this article, I plan to cover a brief review of landmark cases, including TN law, and a summary of the current limitation of prayer in public schools.

T.C.A. § 49-6-3401 lists the grounds on which a student may be suspended in Tennessee. The list is not exhaustive, reading carefully you will notice that those violations…

The Landmark Tinker case has guided whether a school can punish a student for speech, but that soon may change. Over the past decade, the use of social media has exploded and students are often choosing social media as their mode of expression. When posts are reported, school officials struggle to enforce rules while not limiting the 1st Amendment rights of students. 

Republican led legislatures around the country took quick action to pass laws that prohibited a student that identified with a different gender than that of birth from competing in athletic events. In Tennessee

When I was in school there was only one type of suspension, today there are two primary types, in-school (ISS) and out-of-school (OSS) suspensions, but school officials also can limit their suspensions to specific classes and school-sponsored events.