Attorneys from multiple law organizations including the ACLU, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, and Oklahoma Appleseed met to discuss the current status of Black Emergency Response Team or BERT vs O’Connor.
The case challenges Oklahoma's House Bill 1775, which passed in 2021 and prohibits teaching certain concepts related to race and gender. classroom censorship law passed in 2021.
Kevin S. Johns, an associate for McDermott Will & Schulte, which is providing pro bono counsel for the case, spoke to the state’s argument that classroom instruction is government speech.
“Essentially, the defendants are saying that when a teacher is speaking in the classroom, they are in fact speaking as the government,” he said. “Now, this would mean, according to defendants, that teachers' speech is not protected by the First Amendment, since government speech is not subject to the First amendment.”
Sam Boyd, a senior supervising attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the outcome of this case is critically important for students across the country, not just in Oklahoma.
“These laws create a climate of fear that goes far beyond even the sort of egregious censorship that the laws themselves require,” he said. “The overwhelming majority of the impacts of these laws will never be reported, but will quietly and profoundly shape children's education in ways that we'll be dealing with for decades to come.”
A partial preliminary injunction was granted in 2024, stopping the law from being enforced in college classrooms.. Litigators for the case filed a brief on Wednesday asking for a broadened preliminary injunction that includes K-12 classrooms.
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