A federal judge has held that New York City has the right to bar teachers from wearing political campaign buttons in public schools.
“While a majority of students, particularly older students, presumably would understand that the views expressed by their teachers’ campaign buttons are personal rather than institutional, there is a clear relationship between the regulation and defendants’ legitimate interests in avoiding both the inevitable misperceptions on the part of a minority and, perhaps even more important, in avoiding the entanglement of their public educational mission with partisan politics,” Southern District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote Friday in deferring to the schools chancellor and Board of Education’s ban on teacher-worn political buttons.
While declining to grant an injunction against the button ban, the judge ruled in Weingarten v. Board of Education, 08 Civ. 8702, that the city cannot prevent teachers from placing candidate-related political materials on union bulletin boards in areas closed to students or in staff mailboxes.
