(The Center Square) – A new lawsuit says a New Hampshire school district violated the First Amendment by preventing parents from wearing bracelets with “XX” markings in protest of boys playing on the girls soccer team of a public high school.
Parents and a grandparent of students on the soccer team filed a federal lawsuit on Monday. The lawsuit says the Bow School District’s policy governing conduct at school events encroached on their rights because the school used it to regulate their speech and enforced it by police.
Marcy Kelley, superintendent of the Bow and Dunbarton School Districts, told Chalkboard that she had no comment.
Parents are represented by the Institute for Free Speech.
“Over 50 years ago, in the Tinker case, the Supreme Court held that all Americans have the right to silently protest the Vietnam War by wearing a black armband to school,” Del Kolde, a senior attorney at the Institute for Free Speech, said in a release. “Today, the political debate is different, and the wristbands are pink, instead of black, but the First Amendment protects our clients no less today than it did 50 years ago.
“Applying these policies to ban pink wristbands as a silent show of support for women’s sports is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.”
A week before the soccer match between Bow High and Plymouth Regional High, the U.S. District Court of New Hampshire – the same court as the one in which the parent’s lawsuit was filed – blocked the state Department of Education from enforcing a new law that would prohibit boys from playing on girls sports teams.
One of the male students in that case challenging the law is on the Plymouth girls varsity soccer team that played Bow on Sept. 17, the lawsuit says.
Before the game, the mother of a Bow player, Nicole Foote, complained to Bow High School’s athletic director, Mike Desilets, about the “competitive unfairness and injury risk to female athletes inherent in allowing biological males participate in women’s sports,” the lawsuit says.
Also, before the game, the lawsuit says Desilet emailed families telling them “any inappropriate signs, references, language or anything else present at the [September 17] game will not be tolerated.”
“Two parents whose daughters play on the girls’ soccer team, Kyle Fellers and Anthony “Andy” Foote (Nicole’s husband), decided to attend the game and silently express their opinion about the importance of reserving women’s sports for biological females,” the lawsuit reads. “They agreed to wear pink wristbands, purchased off Amazon.”
“As purchased, these wristbands were the type of pink bands that athletes often wear to raise awareness about breast cancer and had no writing on them. The night before the game, Andy Foote decorated their wristbands with two black Xs, symbolizing the female chromosomes,” the lawsuit reads.
According to the complaint, parents began wearing the armbands during the second half of the game and made no other visible or audible protest. The complaint says Desilets approached Andy Foote 10 minutes after he and others put them on and told them he “was not allowed to protest at the game and to take off the wristband.”
While Foote complied, Fellers did not, the complaint says, so Desilet spoke to the principal and Bow Police Lt. Phil Lamy, who ultimately told Fellers that he “had to either leave the game or remove the wristband” and that “the First Amendment did not apply as Fellers was on private property.”
Chalkboard was unsuccessful in a request for comment from Lamy prior to publication.
The complaint then says the referee, Steve Rosetti, paused the game and told spectators that “Bow High School would forfeit the game … if the wristbands were not all removed.” The parents and others wearing the wristbands complied and the game went on without incident, the lawsuit says.
According to the lawsuit, in the days after the soccer game, Kelley sent Foote and Fellers “No Trespass Orders” for their role in protesting at the soccer game which “had the effect of intimidating, threatening, harassing, and discouraging” a player on the opposite team.
Foote and Fellers say the orders keeping them off school property disrupt their lives and make it difficult for them to take their children to school.
“Parents don’t shed their First Amendment rights at the entrance to a school’s soccer field,” Fellers said in the release. “We wore pink wristbands to silently support our daughters and their right to fair competition.
“Instead of fostering open dialogue, school officials responded with threats and bans that have a direct impact on our lives and our children’s lives. And this fight isn’t just about sports – it’s about protecting our fundamental right to free speech.”
• This story initially published at Chalkboard News, a K-12 news site that, like The Center Square, is also published by Franklin News Foundation.
