The U.S. Supreme Court declined on June 8 to hear a free-speech appeal from a Michigan student who wore a black cap showing an AR-style rifle and the phrase “come and take it” during a school’s Hat Day event in 2022. Lower courts said the school could restrict
The hat didn’t look like trouble at first. It was a black baseball cap worn during “Hat Day” as part of a weeklong kindness initiative at Robert Kerr Elementary School in Durand, Michigan.
But the message printed on the cap — an image of an AR-style rifle and the phrase “come and take it” — put it at the center of a First Amendment fight that ended when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case on June 8.
The student, a Michigan third grader, said she chose the cap for Hat Day during the “Great Kindness Challenge” in 2022 because it reminded her of her father and because she wanted to show support for gun rights.
School officials, however, said the hat’s message could be disruptive. They pointed to students who had transferred to the district after a recent school shooting about 50 miles away — described as the deadliest school shooting in the state’s history. Officials said the cap’s content. given the circumstances. was not the kind of speech the school had to tolerate in class.
The Supreme Court declined to hear arguments that the school violated the student’s free speech rights by prohibiting the hat.
In its decision, the court also passed on a separate opportunity from last year to decide whether a Massachusetts school erred by banning a T-shirt that said “There are only two genders.”
Both disputes turned on a 1969 Supreme Court standard for student speech — a case in which the court said schools could not stop students from wearing black armbands in support of ending the Vietnam War as long as the expression wasn’t too disruptive.
The court’s approach was contrasted with a different 2007 ruling. That earlier decision held that a student in Alaska did not have a First Amendment right to hold up a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”
In the Michigan case, lawyers for the student and her father, Adam Stroub, argued that the school offered no evidence the hat was actually disruptive and that the real motivation was to silence a viewpoint they disliked.
“Rather than take the opportunity to convey to a bright. politically aware 8-year-old that her voice and thoughts matter. school officials instead told her to sit down and shut up − presumably because they personally don’t like the Second Amendment or the rights it protects. ” the lawyers said in the appeal.
The school’s position was that its concerns extended beyond the phrase on the cap. Lawyers for the school said the district’s rules also addressed violent-themed clothing through its dress code, and they tied their disruption concern to the recent shooting and the age of the students.
The district court and the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals both ruled against the student. A three-judge panel from the appeals court said the school’s disruption concern was reasonable given the recent school shooting, the students’ age, and the hat’s provocative message.
When the full appeals court declined to rehear the case, Judge Chad Readler described the circumstances as unusually specific. He called the combination of factors “a rare confluence of events.”
“It’s very unlikely, he said, “that a future First Amendment challenge will weave together a similar factual tapestry.”
The sequence of rulings left the Supreme Court with no path forward for this student’s argument, even as the case pressed the core question at the heart of student speech: how much disruption a school can anticipate — and whether that anticipation is enough to outweigh a child’s expression.
Supreme Court student free speech Michigan school Great Kindness Challenge Hat Day come and take it gun rights First Amendment 6th Circuit Robert Kerr Elementary School Adam Stroub