## Facts

- Cecilia Lacks was a tenured high school English and journalism teacher in the Ferguson-Florissant (Ferguson Reorganized School District R-2) and sponsored the student newspaper.
- Lacks regularly permitted students to use explicit profanity and vulgarity in written assignments, some of which were performed, videotaped, read aloud, or published through school-related activities.
- Student complaints and administrator concerns led the principal and other administrators to meet with Lacks several times and tell her that the school did not allow student profanity in class or in student written work.
- The district maintained a student-discipline code prohibiting profanity, and a school-board policy required teachers to enforce that code.
- During the district’s investigation, Lacks acknowledged she knew about the anti-profanity policy but defended her classroom method and took the view that the policy should not apply to student “creative” work.
- The superintendent charged Lacks with violating school-board policy by failing to enforce the discipline code’s prohibition on profanity.
- After a school-board hearing, the school board terminated Lacks’s teaching contract, finding that she knew the policy and persisted in not enforcing it even after being directed to do so.
- Lacks sued the school board in Missouri state court, asserting Missouri-law claims (including that the termination lacked support in the record) and federal claims, including First Amendment and race-discrimination claims; the district removed the case to federal court.
- The federal district court denied the district’s motion to dismiss Lacks’s First Amendment claims and granted partial summary judgment to Lacks on her Missouri-law claim seeking judicial review of the board’s termination decision.
- The federal claims proceeded to a jury, which returned a verdict for Lacks on her First Amendment and race-discrimination claims.
- The school district appealed to the Eighth Circuit, challenging both the Missouri-law summary judgment ruling and the jury verdict on the federal claims.

## Issues

1. Whether substantial evidence supported the school board’s decision to terminate Lacks under Missouri law, such that the district court erred by setting the termination aside on summary judgment.
2. Whether the school district violated the First Amendment by terminating a teacher for allowing repeated and extreme student profanity in curricular, classroom, and school-sponsored activities.
3. Whether the evidence was sufficient to support the jury’s verdict that the termination decision was motivated by race discrimination.

## Decision

- The Eighth Circuit reversed and remanded with instructions to enter judgment in favor of the Ferguson Reorganized School District R-2.
- The court held that the school board’s termination decision was supported by substantial evidence under Missouri law and that the district court improperly displaced the board’s factfinding.
- The court held that the school district did not violate the First Amendment by disciplining Lacks for allowing students to use profanity repetitiously and egregiously in their written work and related class activities.
- The court held that the evidence did not support the jury’s race-discrimination verdict; the district was entitled to judgment as a matter of law on that claim.

## Legal Principles

- When Missouri law provides for judicial review of a school-board termination decision, the reviewing court asks whether the board’s decision is supported by substantial evidence and does not reweigh conflicting evidence or substitute its own view of disputed facts.
- A public school may regulate vulgar and plainly offensive expression in curricular or school-sponsored activities, and it may discipline a teacher who refuses to carry out reasonable classroom and discipline rules directed to that end.
- A teacher’s asserted “academic freedom” interest in classroom method does not prevent a school board from requiring compliance with school policies governing student conduct and the content permitted in classroom assignments and school-sponsored publications or performances.
- A race-discrimination claim requires evidence from which a reasonable factfinder could conclude that the stated reason for the adverse action was a pretext and that the real reason was intentional discrimination; absent such evidence, judgment for the employer is required.

## Conclusion

The Eighth Circuit reversed the district court’s rulings and the jury’s verdict for Lacks, holding that substantial evidence supported the school board’s decision to terminate her for refusing to enforce the district’s no-profanity rules in student work, that the termination did not violate the First Amendment, and that the trial record could not support a finding of race discrimination.


Lacks v. Ferguson Reorganized School District R-2, 147 F.3d 718 (1998)