Background and Procedural History
On January 23, 2002, students and staff at Juneau-Douglas High School were permitted to leave classes to watch the Olympic Torch pass by. Joseph Frederick, who was late for school that day, joined some friends on the sidewalk across from the high school, off school grounds. Frederick and his friends waited for the television cameras so they could unfurl a banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS". Frederick was quoted as saying he'd first seen the phrase on a snowboard sticker. When they displayed the banner, then-principal Deborah Morse ran across the street and seized it.
Morse initially suspended Frederick for five days for violating the school district's anti-drug policy, but later increased the suspension to ten days after Frederick quoted Thomas Jefferson. Frederick administratively appealed his suspension to the superintendent, who denied his appeal but limited it to the time Frederick had already spent out of school prior to his appeal to the superintendent (eight days). Frederick then appealed to the Juneau School Board, which upheld the suspension on March 19, 2002.
Read more about this topic: Morse V. Frederick
Famous quotes containing the words background and, background and/or history:
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)