Middle School Sued After Getting Stupid About ‘Justice For Lil Pickle’ T-Shirts Worn By Students
from the feel-free-to-craft-your-own-in-a-pickle-joke dept
A middle school in California has screwed up. And now it’s getting taken to court. Hillel Aron gives us the background over at Courthouse News Service:
It was, perhaps, inevitable that the strange incident at a Ventura County middle school last year when dozens of students were banned from wearing T-shirts reading “Justice for Lil Pickle,” would result in a First Amendment lawsuit.
It began, innocently enough, with a Friday lunchtime recital by student Dylan Arevalo, otherwise known as Lil Pickle. The day before, Arevalo announced on Instagram that he would be performing his original song, “Crack is Wack,” along with two other students. Buzz for the performance was stronger than anyone would have imagined — hundreds of middle schoolers showed up for the outdoor concert. School staff found the size of the crowd troubling, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit [PDF], filed in Ventura County by student “G.K.”, fills the rest of the details.
The first stupid thing was calling the cops. I know administrators tend to get concerned the moment students decide to start exercising their freedom of association rights, but possibly some more due diligence than “oh noes a crowd is forming” was needed before involving law enforcement.
Then there’s the follow-up activities, like confiscating phones, demanding students delete recordings of the aborted performance and the confluence of cops and administrators. In the end, “Lil Pickle” was sent home for the rest of the day, which set off another, more entrepreneurial, chain of events.
G.K. borrowed his friend’s heat press and cranked out several dozen shirts featuring the phrase “Justice for Lil Pickle.” According to the lawsuit, he sold these for $15 each, with some of the purchasers being teachers at the school.
When G.K. and his younger sister (along with other students) wore their T-shirts to school, they were ordered to cover them up or remove them. G.K. refused. The school called his father, who happens to be Santa Barbara Police Department captain(!) in hopes of having him talk some sense into his child. Instead, the officer said he supported G.K.(!!) and any choice his child decided to make. Ultimately, G.K. donned a sweatshirt over the Justice shirt. His younger sister refused to cover the shirt up and was sent home.
The school can’t really explain why it did this. There didn’t appear to be any disruption. If anyone was disrupting learning, it was the administrators who were hunting down kids wearing the shirts and demanding they cover them up.
As the lawsuit notes, the two administrators couldn’t even agree on why they were demanding students change clothes.
Plaintiffs are informed and believe and based thereon allege that Defendant Lorelle Dawes found issue with the use of the term “Pickle” while Defendant Jennifer Branstetter was personally offended with the use of the word “Justice” related to the individuals in the performance and the conduct the school took regarding the performance.
The administrators then hastily enacted a ban on clothing referencing “Lil Pickle,” something that wasn’t in the school’s dress code prior to their overreaction to the innocuous t-shirts. Then they extended the ban to include “the use of the word “pickle” and the display of pickle-related imagery”(!!!) and threatened to punish anyone wearing decals, pins, or “face paint”(!!!!) referencing “Lil Pickle” or, apparently, pickles of any size.
So, the First Amendment. Still a thing and still a right possessed by students. Sure, there are limitations, but they’re usually related to school safety/security concerns. This right can also be curtailed when speech results in significant disruption of the education process.
Granted, this lawsuit presents only one side of the story. But there’s very little in here that even hints at the overriding concerns the school needed to have in place before punishing students for using the word “pickle.”
And this email from one of the administrators to G.K.’s father (the police officer) certainly doesn’t allege anything rational about their response to a non-event they chose to make an event by going after anyone in pickle gear.
Dawes defended the decision in an email to Kenny Kushner on Monday obtained by the Star, saying that administrators were afraid that continued “frenetic energy around Little Pickle” might lead to another “mob or riot.”
Oddly, it’s the police officer offering a rational take on the administrators’ behavior:
“I was really taken aback,” Kenny Kushner said. “It felt so overreaching.“
This is from someone who actually knows something about mobs, riots, and official overreach.
The proper response to these shirts was to do nothing. In a few weeks, everyone would have moved on and the Lil Pickle incident would be nothing more than a footnote in the school’s history. Instead, two administrators decided students were not allowed to show their support for a fellow student. The actual motivation appears to have been embarrassment, not fear of a “mob or riot.” And that inability to do nothing when faced with implicit criticism is likely going to see this school racking up a loss in court.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, dylan arevalo, free speech, jennifer branstetter, justice for lil pickle, lil pickle, lorelle dawes, protests, schools
Comments on “Middle School Sued After Getting Stupid About ‘Justice For Lil Pickle’ T-Shirts Worn By Students”
School admin freaking out right now over Lil Pickle?
Just wait ’til Big Pickle shows up!
'The only people allowed to disrupt school is us!'
I’d love it if their own arguments were used against school administration/staff for once…
‘So creating a disturbance to school is grounds for suspension?’
‘Absolutely, kids are here to learn and those that disrupt that need to be sent home to learn from their mistakes.’
‘Cool, you’re on unpaid leave for the next two weeks, hopefully when you get back you’ll have learned not to throw another tantrum and disrupt things for everyone else.’
don’t forget, the Streisand Effect is now applicable, so now EVERYONE that reads stories like this one, now knows about Lil Pickle and it wouldn’t have just been a local side note.
It’s a real shame how civil liberties collapsed after the U.S. withdrew and the Taliban took over.
Wait, let me recheck… Never mind.
lil pickle
now – even in New Zealand, we have heard of this…..well done school staff – perhaps you should charge Lil Pickle for advertising??????
Yep, they’re in a real pickle now.
Through my long years of life, from being a young public school student, to dealing with issues involving my own daughter, and otherwise knowing this breed of humanoid, I have found that public school administrators in general have the working brains of the level found in tennis balls. Those who don’t possess the logic and good sense necessary to work as, say, Republican party officials or Legislators, small-town cops or Fundamentalist preachers, can always find work and like-minded individuals, as public school administrators. Just how or why these insipid morons find their ways out of bed in the morning completely escapes me. And just to top it off, the vast majority of these idiots pull down around $150K per year, while subservient teachers who actually work for their meager living are trying to figure out where the next meal will originate. Perhaps I’m a bit jaded, but experience has taught me that the most useless members of the human race tend to be public school administrators. The mass overpaying of such vermin simply adds much insult to inherent injury. Students, teachers and parents all suffer unnecessarily as a result.
Re:
Old saws:
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.
Those who can’t teach, go into administration.
Anyone else want to show up and sell pickles to the students to have at lunchtime?
Re:
No need. The kids can just ask for extra pickles on every meal they buy in the cafeteria.
“Can I have a pickle with my apple pie?” could become the new rallying cry.
Where does one purchase a Lil’ Pickle shirt?
Up next!
“Justice for Lil Babs”
Crack is Wack
And we don’t care Jack
If they check backpacks
Gonna find some tack
Dope got back
On the railway track
Cos my bro’s ain’t slack
And that’s a fact
We be shiftin’ wack
Cos we got the knack
In my portapack
Gots some mean greenback
Now that admin hack
Gonna see payback
In their kitchen rack
Pigs’ll find some smack
offended by pickles and... justice?
Being offended by pickle is weird, but the one teacher being offended by justice is awful.
I think the next step is new t-shirts: “I am Lil’ Pickle”
Law and Order
There was an episode of Law and Order where the witness wouldn’t cooperate. The DA realized the witness was a rapper and offered him jail time if he would cooperate. The witness started talking immediately.
Do you think Little Pickle made a deal with the admin to get some street cred?
M experience...
My experience in community events like community theatre – so many teachers 9and principals) seem to act like children, probably because they spend their entire days interacting with children instead of mature adults. Plus they have a level of power that people in other jobs just don’t, with minimal restraints.
Why is this even news?
This is par for the course in a fascist totalitarian nation like the USA. Why are you acting surprised?
i haven’t seen the lyrics for Lil’ Pickle’s Crack is Wack, but historically, this is an anti-drug statement (barring songs about other cracks), so possibly good job with that also, school.
Free speech and assembly are contrary to the purpose of public school, which is indoctrination with a side order of babysitting. “Education” refers to knowing one’s place and learning to tolerate tedious assignments, and at the heart of it all is CONTROL. The politicians have spent DECADES chiseling away at the curriculum because knowledge is power, and they cede that to no-one. It’s just a logical extension of the old “barefoot and pregnant” trap they are so fond of. Slavery never went away. The chains were simply replaced with DEBT, and the public education system is designed to create WORKERS, not leaders. We’re almost back to where we started from- taxation without representation. Everyone knows what comes NEXT. I hope we at least get a better anthem out of this next attempt.
Another t-shirt
Recipe:
“Take a vegetable and steep one part vinegar two parts sugar until stewed. Add salt an necessary”
Really?
They banned the word “Pickle”? So would my kids just not be allowed to say their last name? And yes, “Pickle” IS my real last name. Has been for a lot of years. 🤷♀️
Those school officials have serious issues.
For this school year, Principal Dawes received a promotion to a directorship with Ventura Unified School District. VUSD seems unfazed by infringements of students’ rights and access to education.