Federal Judge Overrules Schools Agency, Orders Lower Manhattan Parent Reinstated to Education Panel
A Lower Manhattan resident and Stuyvesant High School parent who was elected to serve on the Community Education Council (CEC) for District 2 of the New York City public school system, and then removed by the Department of Education, has been restored to her position by a federal court order.
The CEC is a 12-seat panel responsible for advising the DOE on educational policies consequential to the district. Maud Maron (right) was first elected to the CEC for District 2 — which encompasses Lower Manhattan and the West Side up to 59th Street, and the East Side up to 97th Street (with the exception of the Lower East Side) — in 2019, and then re-elected in 2021 and 2023.
On June 14, Schools Chancellor David Banks removed Ms. Maron from the CEC, invoking his power under a set of DOE rules that say CEC members “shall not engage in any conduct that subjects any person or entity to discrimination or harassment,” and stipulate that violating this regulation “may serve as a basis for discipline, even if it does not rise to the level of a violation of federal, state or local discrimination laws.”
Mr. Banks’s rationale for dismissing Ms. Maron hinged on an anonymous essay published in the Stuyvesant student newspaper, The Spectator, in February. This opinion piece, titled “Black and White: The Withheld History of Palestine and Israel,” was bitterly critical of Israel and its conduct during the war that began last October. Ms. Maron, who is also an elected member of Stuyvesant’s School Leadership Team, disagreed vehemently with this piece and told the New York Post that “the byline should read ‘coward’ instead of ‘anonymous.’”
In a June 14 notification to Ms. Maron, Mr. Banks wrote that an investigation “found that your statement to the Post constituted conduct involving derogatory and offensive comments about a student, and unnecessary aggressive speech that served to intimidate and cause others to have concern for their personal safety…. Your statement was further found to have created a foreseeable risk of disruption within the district and school community, especially in light of the highly public forum in which it was made.” He concluded, “you engaged in a public, personal attack against a student. You did so in the context of an issue that is highly politically charged, in a climate in which harassment and targeting of those who express unpopular opinions is common, and in a tabloid publication whose articles often provoke extreme reactions.”
The appropriate disciplinary action, Mr. Banks concluded, was immediate dismissal from the CEC.
Ms. Maron, who is an attorney, quickly filed suit in federal court, seeking reinstatement and arguing (among other allegations) that she had been removed from office for engaging in constitutionally protected free speech.
In a September 3 decision, District Court Judge Diane Gujarati ruled in favor of Ms. Maron. “It is axiomatic that the government may not regulate speech based on its substantive content or the message it conveys [and] discrimination against speech because of its message is presumed to be unconstitutional,” she wrote.
Judge Gujarati continued, “viewpoint discrimination is a subset or particular instance of the more general phenomenon of content discrimination, in which the government targets not subject matter, but particular views taken by speakers on a subject,” adding, “the government discriminates against viewpoints when it disfavors certain speech because of the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker.”
The decision also noted that in reply to Ms. Maron’s argument that she had been elected (at least in part) to advocate precisely for the viewpoints Mr. Banks used to justify her removal from office, lawyers representing the City argued, “there’s a subjective component, actually, to all this democracy and sometimes we’re just not going to allow it.”
In addition to free speech grounds, Judge Gujarati also criticized, under what is known as “the Vagueness Doctrine,” the authority claimed by DOE to dismiss Ms. Maron. She found the DOE rules to be ambiguous, encouraging “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement” and ordered “that Plaintiff Maron shall be reinstated immediately to her elected position on the Community Education Council.”
A DOE spokesman did not reply to a request for comment.