Here’s the latest on the ACLU’s lawsuit against Souderton Area School District

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On Monday, a federal judge dismissed a motion for a temporary restraining order filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania on behalf of two parents and a former student whom Souderton Area School District had banned from board meetings.

The motion, originally filed in November, sought to block the district’s ban. However, the judge determined the issue was no longer relevant because the district lifted the ban in March.

According to the lawsuit, two parents, Patrick Kitt and Christopher Spigel, and Spigel’s daughter, a former student, verbally confronted school board member Kim Wheeler and her daughter in the parking lot after a tense board meeting on Sept. 26. The plaintiffs, along with other community members, were calling for the resignation of school board member Bill Formica due to a lewd comment he posted on the social media site X in August about then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

The district issued a cease-and-desist letter to the three individuals two weeks after the incident, banning them from school grounds. According to the ACLU, the district falsely claimed that the parents and former student were physically close to Wheeler, yelled at her, and blocked her from exiting. A surveillance video “contradicts the district’s account,” the ACLU said in a press release.

The school district said it does not have a comment since the case is in litigation.

The case continues as the three plaintiffs are asking for damages from the ban. Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue it is a First Amendment right to hold demonstrations on school grounds ahead of school board meetings, and that the district’s decision to check identification for meeting attendees, a policy which it has since dropped, is unconstitutional.

“We think that there’s a pretty strong First Amendment protection for demonstrating,” said Sara Rose, deputy legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “It’s public property. It’s at a public event open to the public. People should have a right to express their views before school board meetings, and shouldn’t be confined to sort of the sides of the road, like Souderton had been doing.”

Rose said that although the district stopped requiring attendees to show their IDs before meetings, the complaint is asking a judge to prohibit the district from performing ID checks in the future.

“School board meetings … by law are open to the public,” she said. “And so we think that people should be able to attend regardless of whether they’re able to present ID or not.”