When a 12-year-old student asked another student whether a social media post threatened violence against her school, she had no idea she would end up accused of making the threat and suspended for one year.

That reportedly happened to A.N., a student from Jackson, Missouri, near Cape Girardeau, in September 2024.

Now her family is suing the Jackson R-II School District after her initial 10-day suspension was extended to 180 days, the length of a school year. Her case alleges violations of the First and Fourteenth amendments, which guarantee the rights to free speech and due process.

Dave Roland, the family’s attorney, says the case is so important it could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“As a matter of due process, when a student is facing severe penalties like expulsion or a year’s worth of a suspension, you’ve got to provide procedural protections to make sure that the process is fair and to reduce the likelihood of mistakes,” Roland, the Goldwater Institute’s director of allied litigation, told Heartlander News in an interview.

Student concerned about a threat

The issue started when A.N., who had good grades and no prior disciplinary issues, saw a concerning post on Snapchat. She asked another student, who attended Cape Girardeau schools and seemed to know a lot about school violence, if the post was threatening, Roland said.

The other student asked if she had a screenshot. She didn’t, so she recreated what she saw and sent it to him. That was Thursday night. Friday morning, she awoke to learn that school was canceled, and police soon knocked on her door. The other student had posted the image she’d sent, which included her name, without any context.

“Very quickly, the police realized there’s nothing to see here,” Roland said. “And so they say, ‘Yeah, you’re not a suspect. We don’t think you did anything wrong. Clearly, you are not intending to threaten anything.’”

But school officials saw it differently. On Sunday afternoon, her mother received a call from the superintendent requiring her and A.N. to attend a meeting the next day.

“They did not tell her what policies she was accused of violating. They did not tell her that they were considering long-term suspension or potentially expulsion. So walking into this meeting, they didn’t really know what the stakes were at all, and they had less than 24 hours,” Roland said.

The student explained that she was worried about online threats of violence and showed screenshots of her dialogue with the other student.

Suspension increased

School officials decided later that afternoon on a 10-day suspension, which her parents chose not to challenge.

However, less than two days after her return to school, the superintendent announced the suspension was being increased to an entire school year.

Roland said it was later revealed during questioning that the superintendent had spoken to a police officer who told him the girl hadn’t seen anything in the first place, which is why he increased the suspension.

“They never told the parent or the child that they were getting statements from other people who said, ‘Oh, no, she didn’t actually see anything,’ and so they never had an opportunity to address that,” Roland said. “They never had an opportunity to cross-examine the people that were contradicting her version of the events. She didn’t have any of those opportunities. And that’s just a basic element of due process, especially when you’re talking about a really severe penalty.”

Roland explained that the Supreme Court ruled more than 50 years ago that stronger school penalties require greater levels of due process – levels he says the school failed to meet.

“The Supreme Court said if you’re only dealing with a 10-day suspension, you can get away with this bare minimum level of due process. But it specifically said if you’re talking about a more severe suspension, a long-term suspension or an expulsion, then the bar is going to need to be set higher.”

The school won the first round of the case in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, but Roland has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which is based in St. Louis.

“We’re asking the Eighth Circuit to look specifically at the due process issues here, but then also it’s important that they revisit the free speech issue, because students have to be permitted to engage in conversations with each other on matters of public concern, particularly where the student really couldn’t have anticipated the way that everything would have been blown out of proportion. She could not have anticipated that asking this other student about what she had seen would have resulted in people believing she had made a threat to shoot up the schools.”

A permanent mark on her record

Roland is also concerned because the suspension is a permanent mark on A.N.’s record, which could impede her future.

The family homeschooled her during the suspension, then had a difficult time placing her in private school because of her disciplinary record.

“Initially, her mom was applying to all of these private schools all around, and when they saw that she has on her disciplinary record that she threatened to shoot up a school, they wouldn’t touch her,” Roland said.

“And so they applied to this one school. The school turned her down, and the mom contacted the administrators. She said, ‘Look, we have sued to vindicate our rights and to clear my daughter’s name here. Will you please just read a letter from the attorney?’ After reading it, they changed their minds and they said, ‘We are so sorry you guys have had to deal with this and we totally get it. And yes, we will admit her.’ So she will be starting at a private high school this fall.”

There’s also the social cost, including the loss of friendships and stigma in the community of about 16,000.

“She’s lost a huge number of her friends,” Roland said. “She has been told that some of the kids at her old school think that she’s a psycho because the school has never allowed any other story. Even though they’re now aware of all of this context and everything, they still maintain that their punishment is just.

“They maintain that they’re justified in having on her permanent school record that she threatened to shoot up a school. And that’s the kind of thing that follows a child for the rest of her life. And that’s why it’s so important that we get this expunged from her record.”

The suit seeks to clear her record and $125,000 in damages.

Roland said he’s prepared to appeal as high as necessary.

“Our intent in filing the case was to fight it as far as we need to. We took on the case because we viewed it as the kind of case that might ultimately end up at the US Supreme Court.”



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