A group, which started as two moms who banned together against a Georgia school district in an effort to expose inappropriate material, has settled its battle in federal court.
Mama Bears, founded by Cindy Martin, won a federal First Amendment case against Forsyth County School District. The group wanted to expose a book containing sexual material, according to Fox News Digital.
The school district will pay the Mama Bears nominal damages of $17.91 and attorneys’ fees of $107,500, according to Fox News.
The school district was taken to federal court after banning Martin and another mother, Alison Hair, from exposing the pornographic material at one of its school board meetings.
Martin was first made aware of disturbing books in 2021 by a friend. After looking into it herself, she was “shocked” and in disbelief with what she discovered.
She explained:
“I could not believe it. So I thought to myself, you know, there’s got to be other moms out there who want to do something. I just put out a notice on social media and said, ‘Hey, does anybody else want to challenge these books with me?’ Because I knew I couldn’t do it alone. And sure enough, moms started raising their hands. And it just was a grassroots movement of moms who wanted to protect their kids.”
Last year, Hair discovered a book titled “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer, which was displayed in her son’s middle school library. She read part of the book, which was sexually explicit, during one of the school’s board meetings.
Hair attempted reading from the book a second time at a school board meeting the next month, but was again denied, Fox News Digital reported.
School district forced to pay over 100K in legal fees after banning moms from exposing pornographic materials https://t.co/JG7NF0ZPlt
— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 23, 2023
After speaking out, Hair received a letter from the school board claiming she “violated their public participation policy at school board meetings” and was banned from meetings until she obeyed the school boards policies.
Following the ban, Moms For Liberty, another parental rights group, sought out help for the Mama Bears group and contacted the Institute For Free Speech.
In July 2022, the Institute For Free Speech filed a lawsuit against the school board.
“We couldn’t believe it because we thought we knew our rights were violated, but we thought nobody’s going to care. We’re just a group of moms trying to talk to our school board, our local school board in this tiny little town,” Martin said.
Continuing, she said, “They reviewed our case. They felt like we had a very good chance to win it. And they said they wanted to represent us.”
According to the Institute For Free Speech, a federal judge in November ruled the school board’s public participation policy was unconstitutional and barred the board from enforcing it. The district was also ordered to end its ban on Hair from speaking at future board meetings.
The judge also stopped the board from prohibiting the public from addressing board members personally, which he said was “not reasonable” and broke the First Amendment.
Del Kolde, senior attorney at the Institute for Free Speech, expressed how he felt about the ruling.
“We are pleased that the Court recognized that the Board repeatedly violated the First Amendment and restored Alison’s right to speak at meetings. Parents and taxpayers have a right to harshly criticize public officials and have a right to read excerpts from school books. In this long and thoughtful opinion, the Court struck down numerous speaking restrictions that were subjective, poorly defined, and unconstitutional,” he said.
He concluded, “We hope that other school boards will review their policies and ensure that they respect the First Amendment.”
On Wednesday, Martin told Fox News Digital how she felt about the win.
“It was an incredible experience as a mom to experience the First Amendment play out,” she shared. “So for any citizen, I feel like it was just an incredible experience to be able to truly start to understand what that was and what our rights are.”
