School administrator’s free speech rights don’t allow for abusive comments

Employees, including school administrators, have constitutional First Amendment rights, but they are not unlimited. Sometimes it comes down to a balancing test, to see if the employees’ free speech interest outweighs the legitimate interests of the employer.

Administrator’s rant goes public

In August 2020, Randey Thompson was an assistant principal at Evergreen Middle School in Washington’s Central Valley School District (CVSD). After watching the Democratic National Convention on television, Thompson made the following post on his Facebook page, visible to his Facebook friends:

Demtard [sic] convention opens . . . . Lie after lie. The fact checkers could retire on Michelle Obama’s rant alone. What a hatefull [sic] racists [sic] bitch. If you need to lie to try and win you are just shit. . . . Wake the fuck up America. You are being played by a fake media, athleats [sic] and performers . . . and the former DNC, now just the little bitch of Marxist BLM, Antifa, and Soroas [sic] socialist. . . . May God help you to pull your heads out of your asses so we will not have too [sic].

While scrolling through Facebook, a CVSD employee saw the post on her newsfeed. She took a screenshot and sent it to her sister, another CVSD employee. The sister forwarded the screenshot to a CVSD administrator, who shared the post with another CVSD administrator, who in turn brought the post to the attention of CVSD Superintendent Ben Small.