A school district is allowed to discipline a sixth-grader for bullying because he made disparaging remarks about a classmate’s vegetarianism.
In a case that climbed up the legal ladder, the state Commissioner of Education’s office has ruled that the Montgomery school district can give detention to the student who told the other sixth-grader that “vegetarians are idiots.”
The case rose to the commissioner’s office because the student’s parent contested the district’s finding that the remarks about vegetarianism constituted bullying, a finding that was later backed by a state administrative law judge.
The case began on Oct. 30, 2014, when the two 11-year-old sixth-graders were having lunch in the cafeteria of Montgomery’s Lower Middle School. One of the students, identified in court papers as C.C., made the comments to another student, K.S., about his decision not to eat meat.
The investigation by the school’s anti-bullying specialist, guidance counselor Lesley Haas, found that C.C. told K.S. that “it’s not good to not eat meat” and that “he should eat meat because he’d be smarter and have bigger brains,” according to court papers.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble, or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.