An Ohio dad is suing a local school district, saying it infringed on his son’s free speech rights by punishing him for wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt to school.
Richard Conrad Jr. filed the federal civil rights lawsuit in Ohio’s Northern District court in Cleveland on behalf of his son, an eighth-grade student at Madison Local School District’s Madison Middle School in Mansfield. The father alleges the school district violated his son’s Fourteenth Amendment right to due process and his First Amendment free speech right.
“Let’s Go Brandon” emerged as a popular anti-President Joe Biden slogan in place of the more vulgar “F--- Joe Biden.”
The anti-Biden chants started during sporting events in September 2021. During a televised interview with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown the following month, NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast said the crowd was chanting “Let’s Go Brandon” instead of its more vulgar counterpart, spurring an internet meme that quickly went viral.
The Ohio federal lawsuit names the Madison Local School District and every one of the district’s five board of education members, WJW-TV in Cleveland reported. It seeks an injunction to prevent the defendants’ “custom of treating free speech as a punishable offense.”
School district Superintendent Robert Peterson declined to comment on the lawsuit when the Cleveland television station asked, as it is ongoing.
According to the district’s student handbook for the current school year, clothing with “obscene, violent or suggestive language or images” is considered inappropriate dress, the television station reported. However, the handbook said the school’s principal “has the final say on appropriate attire.”
According to WJW, students who violate the dress code can call their parents for a change of clothes. They cannot return to class until they change into an appropriate outfit, and their absences are considered “unexcused.”
The first issue with the T-shirt transpired in November 2024, when the student, identified as C.C., took off his outer flannel shirt in a hallway before class, revealing the shirt with the slogan. “A teacher — whom the complaint identifies as a registered Democrat — made the boy button up the shirt to cover the message, telling him, ‘I know what that means,’” the Cleveland station reported.
According to the lawsuit, the principal “demanded” that the student wear the over-shirt for the rest of the day and “never again wear an item communicating the content of this speech.”
The student wore the shirt again in January, prompting the teacher to ask the student, “Do you like offending people?” According to the filing, the boy responded, “That’s not my problem, nobody has to read my shirt.”
The principal slapped the student with a detention punishment after he wore the shirt to school last month. Additionally, the school emailed the father about the student’s “repeated violations” of the student code of conduct.
The lawsuit alleges the student code of conduct, which the board of education set, is “unconstitutionally vague” and gives school employees too much discretion to enforce it.
“C.C.’s expression did not and does not materially and substantially interfere with the orderly conduct of educational activity,” according to the complaint, The Independent reported. “Defendants’ policy and practice give unbridled discretion to school officials by permitting them to forbid messages that they personally deem to be offensive and allow messages they personally do not deem offensive.”
They also cited a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case — Tinker v. Des Moines — concerning black armbands students wore to protest the Vietnam War. The nation’s highest court held that students don’t lose their First Amendment right on school property.
“In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism,” the court ruled. “School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are ‘persons’ under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State.
“In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate,” the opinion added. “They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved. In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views.”
