‘Indecent’ proposal: An NC school club’s plan to test their LGBTQ+ trivia skills is game over — for now

by Lucas Thomae, Carolina Public Press
February 14, 2025

Public school students have fought for the right to express themselves going as far back as the 1940s, most notably during the 1960s and well into the age of social media. Over the years, the Pledge of Allegiance, prayer in schools, the Vietnam War and even Snapchat have been debated. A lawsuit recently filed against Cleveland County Schools, in the western part of the state, could provide the latest addition to the canon.

A student is suing the school district after it prohibited a high school club from playing a quiz game centered around LGBTQ+ history and pop culture.

A complaint filed in U.S. District Court by the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina alleges that the county violated free speech protections in the U.S. and state constitutions, as well as federal law, by banning Shelby High School’s Activism Club from playing the game.

Cleveland County school officials claimed they were justified in forbidding the activity, arguing that the quiz game was “indecent based on community standards.” They pointed specifically to references of “bisexuality” and “cigarettes” as examples.

The ACLU’s attorneys see it differently.

The speech in question was political in nature, not indecent, they say. And decades of precedent from past U.S. Supreme Court rulings indicate that students do not shed their constitutional rights once they arrive on campus.

“The school is blatantly violating our client’s First Amendment rights and trying to suggest that a game that is text only, depicts nothing sexual in nature and just acknowledges the existence of LGBTQ+ people and their contributions to society is somehow indecent, lewd or obscene,” ACLU attorney Ivy Johnson told Carolina Public Press. “They’re essentially trying to erase (LGBTQ+ people) from the conversation, which is both a First Amendment violation and extremely dangerous.”

Controversy in Cleveland County

The plaintiff in the case is the student who founded the school’s Activism Club, a 17-year-old referred to in the complaint as M.K.

The club meets monthly during the regular school day — a “flex period” from 10:45 a.m. to 11 a.m. 

Students are allowed to use the flex period as they wish. The Activism Club often uses the time to “discuss issues of public interest that are not covered in the official curriculum,” according to the complaint. Some of those have included the Black Lives Matter movement, Women’s History Month, breast cancer awareness, suicide prevention and the war in Gaza.

M.K. first proposed the club play a “Jeopardy!”-style quiz game called “LGBTQ+ Representation” in April 2024 during her sophomore year. The quiz, which M.K. created, featured questions asking club members to identify famous LGBTQ+ individuals including politician Harvey Milk, pop star Lady Gaga and comedian Ellen DeGeneres.

Although the club’s faculty advisor, a school counselor, thought the game was a good idea, Shelby High School Principal Eli Wortman decided that students would need to have permission from their parents in order to play.

Because of this, the scheduled date for the quiz game was postponed until the next school year. It was then that M.K. proposed her club play the quiz game last October.

Her proposal was again denied, but this time the rejection came from Cleveland County Schools Superintendent Stephen Fisher via a school board liaison.

That led to lawyers becoming involved.

In early December, Johnson sent a letter to Cleveland County Schools warning administrators that they violated M.K.’s First Amendment rights by prohibiting the club from playing the game.

Six weeks later, an attorney for Cleveland County Schools replied with a three-page letter, clarifying the policies used to make the decision and insisting it was done in a “content-neutral” manner.

Word to the wise

There’s a storied history of Constitutional civil cases that have determined the extent to which public schools can regulate the speech of students.

Perhaps the most famous is Tinker v. Des Moines in which high school student Mary Beth Tinker successfully sued her Iowa school district for First Amendment violations after she was prohibited from wearing a black armband to protest the Vietnam War.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Tinker is the origin of the famous maxim that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates,” and it served as the basis for many future school cases.

Public schools can regulate lewd or profane speech as well as that which encourages illegal drug use, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.

In 1983, high school student Matthew Fraser unsuccessfully tried to bring a First Amendment claim after being suspended for making a sexually suggestive speech at a school assembly.

In 2007, another student’s First Amendment challenge failed after being suspended for holding up a banner that read “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” at a school event.

As far as the Cleveland County situation, the complaint alleges the school board may have violated federal law through its unequal treatment of student groups in a “limited open forum.”

The Equal Access Act, passed by Congress in 1984, makes it unlawful for schools that receive federal funding to discriminate against students meeting within a limited open forum, such as school-sanctioned club meetings, on the basis of the speech at those meetings.

“They’ve created this flex period during the day where school clubs and groups can meet,” Johnson said. “In creating this time period, what the school has done is they’ve created this open forum for students. So therefore they cannot discriminate against the Activism Club for wanting to play this game while allowing all these other student groups to discuss whatever they want.”

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.