Student Fights for Freedom of Expression

Friday morning Colleen Urban was suspended from Alan Alda High School in Philadelphia for wearing a t-shirt with her opinion on the War in Iraq on it.

The t-shirt said, “If there is a God, she would end in the War in Iraq.”

Alan Alda Principal, Mike Bauer, claimed that it was offensive and “disrupting the educational environment.”

Urban, 15, went unnoticed until her fifth period history teacher Jan Gorlin saw it.

“I only teach students who really value what America stands for,” Gorlin said to Urban.

Gorlin walked the sophomore to the principal’s office and told her that, “You brought this on yourself- this would be so much easier if you just let God into your heart.”

Urban’s parents claimed that in the office, Vice Principal Maureen Reed demanded their daughter change her shirt. In doing so, Reed threw a t-shirt with the school’s logo on it at Urban, hitting her in the face. When the she refused to change, Urban was escorted by a security guard to the front entrance of the school. There she was forced to wait outside in temperature in the teens for her parents.

Urban’s parents, Rose and Marty Urban, have hired attorney Shelia
McGee to represent them in a suit filed in the U.S. Federal Court in Philadelphia.

They said that their daughter’s First Amendment right to free expression was violated and that Gorlin’s comments violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

“…She really wasn’t trying to disrupt anything- she just wanted to state her opinion about the War,” Rose Urban said about her daughter.

“This is America, isn’t it? All of us- and that includes students-should be allowed to say what we want,” Marty Urban said.

Reed said in an interview that the school district claims that Urban’s t-shirt interfered with the right of the school officials to maintain discipline in the classroom.

“We just wanted to ensure that Colleen’s actions didn’t get in the way of learning,” Reed said.

McGee, from the Wilmington, Del., firm of Tinkers, Evers and Chance, disagrees.
“The school district’s right to maintain order ends when a student hasn’t disrupted anything. Students do not leave their opinions and their right to free expression at the schoolhouse gate,” Reed said.

- Selina Poiesz