Are students protected under the First Amendment?
To a certain extent, yes. In 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court held that students who wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War were protected in their expression by the First Amendment. “It can hardly be argued,” Justice Abe Fortas wrote in the majority opinion, “that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”8 But more recent cases have trimmed the guarantee suggested by Tinker.
