WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court denied, without comment, an appeal from the families of two victims of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, Daniel Rohrbough and Kelly Fleming, to overturn an earlier decision against them by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Jan. 13. They sued the Jefferson County [Colo.] School District for the right to include Christian messages on memorial tiles installed in the school hallways they had been asked to paint.
School officials asked that the tiles not include religious imagery, references to the attack or its date, names of victims or anything “obscene or offensive.” The plaintiffs objected to the rules, and after consultation with teachers overseeing the tile painting, were allowed to paint tiles with religious messages.
The plaintiffs were informed that their tiles would not be affixed to the walls because they violated the rules. However, some of the tiles ended up being placed on the walls. Approximately 80 of the 2,100 tiles that had been installed were later removed, including some of the plaintiffs’ tiles. The plaintiffs then sued.
A lower federal court ruled that school officials had created a “limited public forum” and thus were bound by Supreme Court precedent to allow any sorts of reasonable expression, including religious.
The school district appealed to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the lower court’s decision. Judge David Ebel, writing the opinion of the three-judge panel, found that school officials had instead created a nonpublic forum that was school-facilitated and school-sponsored, and in which the school had a compelling interest to control the kinds of speech allowed. Therefore, the school could choose to disallow certain kinds of expression, including religious.
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