THE FIRST AMENDMENT
Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof:
or abriding the freedom of speech.
or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition
the government for a redress of grievances.
All my life I had taken democracy for granted. I was assured the intangible concept “freedom” protected me, but I never tested its powerful promise: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….”
Not until my exile at the district office did I fully come to appreciate what our Founding Fathers had created. The magnitude of literature on the First Amendment is extraordinary, the authors of First Amendment Anthology writing that the Constitution is “…characterized by heavy volume, much ideology, considerable passion [and, in the words of Justice Brennan, output]…tends to be as ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open’ as the First Amendment itself contemplates.”
My walk with constitutional law also introduced me to Marvin Pickering and the first teacher-administrative First Amendment dispute to reach the highest court in our land. The United States Supreme Court, in its 1968 bold message of freedom, emphatically supported the rights of public employees to speak out on matters of public concern. That landmark case, Pickering v. Board of Education, paralleled my situation, stating in no uncertain terms: “Teachers are as a class the members of a community most likely to have informed and definite opinions as to how funds allotted to the operation of the schools should be spent. Accordingly, it is essential that they be able to speak out freely on such questions without fear of retaliatory dismissal.”
Our schools teach that to maintain a democratic government by the people, of the people, and for the people, we, that governing body, must acknowledge that free speech, even though we might not always agree with what is being said, is indispensable to liberty. But what we are taught in school is not always what we experience after graduation. Alarmingly, a very different world awaits many who pursue a job in the public arena. In view of my personal experiences as a public school teacher and by reading about similar problems others encountered, I became convinced during my days of banishment that vast numbers of teachers are not granted their inalienable right of free speech. With over two decades in the teaching profession, I was taught by past observations and events in Marion County that many teachers live in terror of administrative retribution, a fear that paralyzes their voice and assures their submissiveness.
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