Mom sues school principal, district after six-year-old daughter punished for 'racist' drawing

MISSION VIEJO, CA - When hearing about a story such as this, it’s easy to believe that you’re being punked. After all, a child in first grade couldn’t possibly be a racist, right? Not the case at the Viejo Elementary School in Mission Viejo, California. It’s always California, right? 

In March 2021, Chelsea Boyle’s first-grade daughter made a drawing for a black friend of hers which she said was drawn to make her friend feel more included in school. Boyle was unaware that at the time, her daughter was being indoctrinated into the Black Lives Matter movement in school, just under a year after the George Floyd riots took place in 2020. 

According to National Review, Boyle was unaware that the school had punished her six-year-old daughter for the drawing because not only did she write “Black Lives Mater,” misspelled as a first-grade student might do, but she also included the words “any life.” 

Of course, the suggestion even by a six-year-old that all lives matter was sacrilege. As punishment for this egregious mistake, the child was kicked out of recess for two weeks, banned from drawing any more pictures for her friends and forced to apologize to her friend, despite neither child understanding why, court documents say. Oh, and Chelsea Boyle, the mother of the child, was never informed by the school. 

“Another mother mentioned it to me, and I was like, ‘Wait, what? I’m sorry, what are you talking about? Are you talking about my daughter?” Boyle told National Review, recalling a March 2022 encounter. “I was irate. I burst into tears.” 

Boyle tried to settle the matter by asking for a simple apology from the school principal, Jesus Becerra, and the Capistrano Unified School District. That apology never came, and Boyle took legal action against the district. In true blue California, a district court judge ruled in favor of school officials, making the utterly bizarre claim that for some reason, the six-year-old’s expression isn’t protected by the First Amendment.

Our copy of the First Amendment makes no delineation of age, but apparently, the one in this particular court does. Or perhaps the judge imagined it. 

Nonetheless, Boyle is pushing the case and with the help of lawyers from the Pacific Legal Foundation, she is appealing the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Pacific Legal is arguing that the decision by the district court “runs against decades of legal precedent that protects the speech of students, even young students, when it is not disruptive,” National Review wrote. The opening brief was filed on July 15. 

This case is a microcosm of what parents nationwide have been facing primarily in far-left states and by radical educators. Parents are tired of teachers and administrators pushing far-left ideology in the classroom, eliminating all dissenting opinions while excoriating students whose opinion differs from theirs, and hiding critical information, such as in this case, from parents. 

“This case is just an example of divisive racial ideology in schools that has gone just so far overboard that even admittedly innocent statements by first-grade students are punished because they appear to stray from the preferred progressive view,” said Caleb Trotter, a Pacific Legal attorney. “That is deeply troubling and alarming.” 

According to National Review, there is ample legal precedent from the United States Supreme Court affirming the ideal that students don’t lose their First Amendment rights when they walk into a school. Trotter highlighted a 1943 ruling, West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, which ruled that under the First Amendment, schools are not permitted to compel students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. 

He also spoke of a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which ruled that teenage students were constitutionally within their rights to wear black armbands to school as a means of protest against the Vietnam War, ruling such demonstrations were not disruptive. 

“The district court saying that elementary school students basically have no First Amendment rights flies in the face of 100 years, at least, worth of Supreme Court precedent and just can’t be allowed to stand,” Trotter continued. “School districts around the country are looking at that. Who knows how emboldened they could be to punish and restrict speech that they disagree with in school.” 

Boyle’s daughter never told her about the punishment she received, no doubt because she was ashamed or embarrassed about it. After the other mother mentioned the incident, she spoke to her daughter and asked her if she’d gotten in trouble for drawing a picture. 

“She said, ‘Yes,’” Boyle told National Review. “I said, ‘Listen, you are not in trouble, you are not in trouble at all. But I need you to tell me exactly what happened, exactly what the picture was, what did you write on the picture, and tell me what happened.’ And she told me the whole story.” 

In a legal brief filed by Pacific Legal, Boyle’s daughter had been exposed to Black Lives Matter indoctrination content while the class was reading about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The school also displayed a Black Lives Matter picture with a clenched fist that the children were exposed to daily. 

Boyle said her daughter, to make her friend feel included, drew a picture that read “Black Lives Mater” [sic] but she also included the words “any life.” She also drew four ovals of different shades at the bottom of the picture representing her and her friends. 

The friend put the picture in her backpack and took it home. When her mother saw it, she reached out to Becerra and wanted to make sure her daughter wasn’t being singled out in class due to her race. She also said she didn’t want Boyle’s daughter punished. 

However, Becerra, clearly a woke loon, said the drawing was “racist” and “inappropriate,” according to the Pacific Legal brief. 

Becerra then told Boyle’s daughter to apologize to her friend over the drawing, however both girls, being only six, “expressed confusion” over the mandated apology, the brief says. Boyle’s daughter was also barred “from drawing and giving pictures to classmates while at school” and was held out of recess for two weeks and “forced to sit on a bench and watch her classmates play without her,” the brief read. In other words, Becerra went out of his way to humiliate the child in front of other students. 

“I was upset that my daughter had been discriminated against,” Boyle said referring to the school’s response. “I was upset that I was never told about it.” 

Boyle said Becerra disputes aspects of her account, however, his “story kept changing and it’s continued to change,” Boyle said. The brief was based on deposition testimony and some 600 pages of documents and notes Boyle has compiled over the years. 

“I saved everything. I saved every email,” Boyle said. “I made sure everything was in writing. Every time I talked to somebody I took notes of what they said.” 

National Review reached out to Becerra both by phone and email, however, those attempts were unsuccessful. 

Boyle reiterated that her initial goal was simply to get an apology from school leaders, however now she feels she is standing up for other marginalized students across the country. 

Boyle told school leaders and her children’s teachers at the outset of the Floyd riots in 2020 that she didn’t want them included in Black Lives Matter instruction. Boyle said she was told that wasn’t being taught, however, that was not the case. She said she now feels misled. 

“My daughter attended school to learn how to read, write, and learn arithmetic,” Boyle said while highlighting the fact the school is below state standards in English and math. “I have no idea why children or babies are learning about this at school, and I thought it was wholly inappropriate. And I think, Viejo Elementary, by doing this, they created this problem.” 

After her dispute with the school district, Boyle said her children were harassed and subjected to retaliation, forcing the family to relocate to Florida. She said her daughter is still suffering aftereffects from the trauma she experienced and has difficulty trusting adults. 

In February, U.S. Central District Court Judge David Carter, a Bill Clinton appointee, granted summary judgment to Becerra and the school district, claiming the First Amendment doesn’t apply to elementary school students, whom he said are “learning to sit still and be polite.” In other words, he’s an ignoramus. 

Carter wrote that elementary school is “not a marketplace of ideas. Thus the downsides of regulating speech there is not as significant as it is in high schools, where students are approaching voting age and controversial speech could spark conducive conversation.” 

He further wrote that “a parent might second-guess [the principal’s] conclusion, but his decision to discipline [Boyle’s daughter] belongs to him, not the federal courts.” 

National Review noted, “So, while Boyle’s daughter’s speech was significant enough to warrant punishment for flouting left-wing norms, it was somehow not significant enough to warrant First Amendment protection.” 

While Trotter and his team remain “very confident in a good result” at the appellate level, he is prepared to take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary. 

Aside from the First Amendment issues and the school’s decision to hide the punishment of her daughter from Boyle, the school missed the opportunity to use the drawing as a “teaching moment” around children’s ability to understand concepts over race. 

“Instead, what they did was they just punished [Boyle’s daughter] from straying from the one view of this that the school, or at least the teacher, wanted to push,” Trotter said. “They just fundamentally failed as educators to properly approach the subject.”