California Family Appeals Ruling Punishing 1st Grader for School Drawing

After an American history lesson, a white child made a drawing to support her black classmate, but school officials took offense and penalized her.

A drawing by a child identified in court papers as B.B. is the subject of a federal civil rights lawsuit against California’s Capistrano Unified School District. The child was punished for the drawing. After losing a First Amendment lawsuit in federal district court, the family appealed the ruling in July 2024. The photo is undated. Photo courtesy of B.B.’s mother, Chelsea Boyle

A schoolchild and her mother asked a federal appeals court this week to decide whether a child should have been punished for making what their lawyers call an innocuous drawing that arose out of a history lesson in class.

The case centers around a drawing in which the white child wrote the phrase “Black Lives Mater [sic]” but then apparently caused offense by qualifying it with the phrase “any life.”