The next day, school officials sent out a school-wide e-mail describing Stout’s conduct as “vandalism” and announced that law enforcement had been notified and was conducting an investigation. A local news station picked up the story. The day after that Gabby was called out of class and told by school officials to write a statement describing her actions. They made her show them her phone logs too, without seeking permission from Stout’s parents. The process suggested a criminal investigation, but Stout was never informed of her rights or given the chance to contact a lawyer. A well-educated high school student of average IQ could identify the school’s behavior as legally indefensible, but then there are no well-educated high school students, except for a few here and there who are as hard to find as the ivory-billed woodpecker.

The high school went on to ban religious messages from being painted on the rock, then “quietly closed the investigation with no apology” and claimed that the whole incident never happened. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorneys took up Gabby’s case based on press accounts, and filed the lawsuit, G.S. v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. It was, to coin a phrase, a slam dunk, and to use another, the school district didn’t have a leg to stand on.

The lawsuit has been settled. The Board of Education agreed to pay $95,000 in damages, apologize to Gabby, issue ” a statement of regret ” and to establish a policy supporting students’ free speech rights.

That nice. It’s not enough. All of the school and district officials who allowed a student to be harassed and mistreated for an expression of support that the totalitarian progressives in the community found offensive should be fired. Unfortunately, tar-and feathering is illegal. This was child abuse, abuse of authority and process, and worst of all, political indoctrination and intimidation. The settlement doesn’t undo the damage. Every student in the school is on notice that any one who expressed non-conforming opinions in public risk the hard hammer of intolerance and shunning coming down. The hungry rats didn’t eat Winston Smith’s face, after all: the threat of it was enough to make him “love Big Brother.”

Responsible, ethical, competent parents should pull their kids out of that school and render it an empty shell with tumbleweeds rolling through the halls until and unless there are serious and sincere measures taken to ensure that there is no indoctrination going on there ever again. We all know that there are thousand of public schools just as committed to leftist indoctrination as Ardrey Kell High School; they are just smart enough not to broadcast their bias by censoring a rock.