'BONG' BANNER TESTS STUDENT FREE SPEECH

The message connected drug use and religion in a nonsensical phrase
that was designed to provoke, and it got Joseph Frederick in a heap of trouble.

After he unfurled his 14-foot "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner on a Juneau,
Alaska, street one winter morning in 2002, Frederick got a 10-day
school suspension. Five years later, he has a date Monday at the
Supreme Court in what is shaping up as an important test of
constitutional rights.

Students don't leave their right to free speech at the school door,
the high court said in a Vietnam-era case over an anti-war protest by
high school students.

But neither can students be disruptive or lewd or interfere with a
school's basic educational mission, the court also has said.

How to strike that balance is the question, particularly since the
Columbine massacre and the Sept. 11 attacks have made teachers and
administrators quicker to tamp down on unruly or unusual behavior.

Other student speech cases making their way through the courts
include a student who was pulled from class after taping an anti-gay
message to his shirt and a middle schooler who got into trouble for a
shirt that uses symbols of drugs and alcohol to criticize President Bush.

Unlike the Vietnam protesters who won their court fight in the late
1960s, Frederick says he was not staking out a political position
with the banner he fashioned with pieces of duct tape as lettering.

"What the banner said was, 'Look here, I have the right to free
speech and I'm asserting it.' I wasn't trying to say anything
religious, anything about drugs," Frederick said in a telephone news
conference from China, where he now teaches English and studies Mandarin.

An array of groups, from advocates of drug law changes to gay rights
backers to supporters of religious freedom, have lined up behind him.
"This case is not about drugs. This case is about speech," said
Douglas Mertz of Juneau, Frederick's lawyer.

The Bush administration, school boards, anti-drug groups and former
drug control directors William Bennett and Barry McCaffrey are
supporting the Juneau schools and principal Deborah Morse. They say
that the court should support school administrators who impose
reasonable limits on student expression and that those limits should
extend to promotion of illegal drugs.

"It was the wrong message, at the wrong time and in the wrong place,"
said former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who is representing
the school district free of charge, in court papers.

Frederick had previous run-ins with school administrators before the
banner dispute. He said he first saw the slogan on a snowboard and
thought it would make a good test of his rights because, though
meaningless, it sounds provocative.

He chose to display the banner during a school-sanctioned event to
watch the Olympic torch relay as it passed through Juneau on its way
to the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

Morse saw the banner, confronted Frederick and suspended him.
Frederick said she doubled the suspension to 10 days when he quoted
Thomas Jefferson on free speech.

Frederick, helped by the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the
principal and the Juneau school district. He lost in federal district
court, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Frederick's
rights were violated and that Morse could be held financially liable
for her actions.

Among the factors that could weigh in the decision, Frederick was
standing on public property, not school grounds when he displayed the
banner. The school said students were allowed to leave class to see
the torch pass by, making the event school-sanctioned. Frederick,
however, never made it to school that day before the event.

The other issue in the case is whether the principal should have to
compensate Frederick. The appeals court said Morse should have known
that her decision to suspend Frederick ran counter to Supreme Court
precedent. But Starr said she made a reasonable, on-the-spot decision
that, even if wrong, should not subject her to a "potentially ruinous
damages award."

Frederick, now 23, said he later had to drop out of college after his
father lost his job. The elder Frederick, who worked for the company
that insures the Juneau schools, was fired in connection with his
son's legal fight, the son said. A jury recently awarded Frank
Frederick $200,000 in a lawsuit he filed over his firing.

Joseph Frederick pleaded guilty in 2004 to a misdemeanor charge of
selling marijuana at Stephen F. Austin State University in
Nagodoches, Texas, according to court records.