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Four years later, Paul Cash is still surprised that an incident he saw as a simple dress code violation resulted in a lawsuit and a published Fifth Circuit opinion bearing his name.

In January 2006, Cash was the principal at Burleson High School outside of Ft. Worth. Two female students arrived at the high school carrying purses emblazoned with the Confederate flag symbol, which was prohibited by the Burleson Independent School District’s dress code policy. When the girls were instructed not to carry the purses, they challenged the policy. Eventually, the girls’ parents filed a lawsuit in federal district court, alleging the district policy violated their daughters’ First Amendment rights and seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. The case is A.M. v. Cash, 585 F.3d. 214 (5^th Cir. 2009), and was reported on p. 23 in the Students section, under Legal Developments in the Texas School Administrators’ Legal Digest, January 2010 edition.

In order to meet the standard applicable to First Amendment challenges (from the 1969 case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District), the District had to show that administrators reasonably forecasted that the Confederate flag purses would cause “substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities.” Using Cash’s affidavit and the records created by the District’s disciplinary tracking system, the District succeeded in meeting this burden.

Cash was accustomed to enforcing District policy with regard to racially inflammatory symbols worn by students. A formally rural district that had recently grown into a suburb of Ft. Worth, Burleson has had its share of racial tension over the years. Fortunately, Cash and his colleagues were adept at documenting incidents in the District’s tracking system. “We always emphasized the use of administrator comments,” recalls Cash. This habit turned out to be invaluable during litigation, since a simple word search could turn up dozens of occurrences of racially motivated student misconduct.

When asked what advice he would give to other administrators, Cash says “documentation of the little things was vital.” He added, “The critical component to all of this was to establish that you had documentation that the presence of the Confederate flag had been disruptive in the past.” Therefore, documentation of every incident, even if it did not result in discipline, was crucial in building the District’s defense.

In addition, Cash notes that his superintendent was wise to seek legal advice from the very beginning. Veteran school attorneys Lynn Rossi Scott (Brackett & Ellis, P.C. in Fort Worth) and Lisa Brown (Thompson & Horton, L.L.P. in Houston, and a member of TSALD's Editorial Advisory Board), counseled the District throughout the internal appeal process. In hindsight, having expert advice from the beginning turned out to be a very wise move. As Cash puts it, “[w]e’re experts in dress code violations, but not many violations move to meeting the Tinker standard.”

Dealing with the media during the lawsuit was “not pleasant at all,” according to Cash. “As usual,” Cash recalls wryly, that the media was “not doing stories on the great things in schools, they were doing stories on dress code violations.” In his opinion, the incident underlying A.M. v. Cash should not have been newsworthy. One thing that surprised Cash was the amount of email he received from people all over the country who either agreed or disagreed with the District’s handling of the Confederate flag purses. Cash responded to all emails in a neutral manner; he saw no reason to inflame the issue any further. He remains incredulous that this case engendered such controversy. Says Cash: “Bottom line is . . . a lot of the District’s time and effort was spent on something that had nothing to do with academics.”

As an experienced public school administrator, Cash was not looking for two federal courts to vindicate his decision to uphold District policy. But it didn’t hurt. “We show up each day and just do our job. We make decisions on a daily basis and do the best we can. This just justifies what you do day to day.”