A short excerpt from the longish Dole v. Connetquot Central School Dist., decided yesterday by Second Circuit Judge Alison Nathan, joined by Judges Michael Park and Maria Araújo Kahn:
Christopher Dolce, Sarah Ecke, and Shinaide McAleavey-Polley are teachers at Connetquot Central High School and "open members of the LGBTQ+ community." Connetquot Central School District officials ordered Ecke to take down two pride flags that hung on the walls of her math classroom. They also told Dolce and McAleavey-Polley that they could not place pride flag stickers on their classroom doors….
{Under Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), and its progeny, when public employees' speech "owes its existence" to their "professional responsibilities," the Government—their employer—can control the content of that speech without implicating their First Amendment rights.} … [A] public high school teacher's classroom wall decorations are speech that "owes its existence" to their "professional responsibilities." After all, teachers decorate their classroom walls as part of their duty to create physical classroom spaces conducive to the curricula they are assigned to teach. Those decorations are thus the Government's speech, and the First Amendment does not apply to them….
