District sued for having ‘conspired’ with police to punish parents’ speech

A coalition of parents sued the Bow School District in New Hampshire on Monday after being punished and threatened over a “silent protest” standing up for women’s sports.

Multiple parents and one grandfather decided to wear pink wristbands during a soccer game to show support for protecting women’s sports, to which the school district threatened to have them arrested for trespassing, the complaint states. The New Hampshire Department of Education was preliminarily enjoined by the court in September from enforcing a state law that cracked down on biological males from participating in women’s sports.

The parents claim that the district “conspired” with a referee and police officer to intimidate and prevent the group from expressing their First Amendment rights, the lawsuit states. After the soccer game, the school banned anyone speaking out from being on school property and attending future games.

“Bow School District’s ban on demonstrations criticizing the decision to allow biological boys to play girls’ soccer—cloaked in the language of ‘disruption’ and ‘harassment’—is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination,” the lawsuit states. “The First Amendment does not allow state-operated schools to become ‘enclaves of totalitarianism.”

The school district’s policy allows officials to monitor the behavior of anyone on school property or in attendance at a school event, which includes “any buildings, vehicles, property, land or facilities used for school purposes or school-sponsored events, whether public or private,” the complaint continues. The high school’s athletics handbook also states that it regulates the conduct and speech of individuals in attendance at games.

Days before the soccer game, Nicole Foote, a mother of one of the players on Bow’s team, met with the athletic director to express concern regarding the potential risks of allowing a biological man to compete in women’s sports, to which the director said the court prevented the school from doing anything, the lawsuit states. The athletic director sent an email the night before the game stating that following the handbook, they would “impose obligations” on any actions from the sideline, noting that any “inappropriate signs, references or language” would not be allowed.

The athletic director also claimed that some differentiating opinions regarding the game would be fine, according to the complaint.

Some individuals who wore the pink wristbands wrote “XX” on them to support female athletes, and no parents on the sidelines wore them in the first half of the game. Besides the wristbands, there were no other indications of parents outwardly protesting, but the athletic director told one parent that he had to take off the wristbands, to which he then argued that First Amendment rights protect the use of the wristbands.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill in 2023 that banned transgender individuals from participating in women’s collegiate sports. Similar to Texas, West Virginia passed a law banning biological men from partaking in women’s athletics, but a court blocked the law in April.

Bow High School did not immediately provide a comment to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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