Victory!

Justice Prins is a middle school student in the Western School District in Parma. 

In 2016 her parents requested that she be able to run on the girls’ cross country track team.  The school district refused, stating that because she is transgender she would have an unfair competitive advantage on the track team. 

In April 2017 the ACLU of Michigan sent a letter to the district explaining that according to medical and scientific experts Justice would not have an unfair advantage, and warning that excluding Justice from the girls’ track team violates her rights under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. 

The district responded in July 2017 by amending its policy to require consideration of medical information when making decisions regarding transgender student participation in gender segregated sports.  Under the new policy, Justice was able to run with the girls’ team in the Fall 2017 season. 

(ACLU Attorney Jay Kaplan.)

Following the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida in February 2018, hundreds of thousands of high school students across the country planned a nationwide walkout for 17 minutes in an effort to urge lawmakers to institute gun reform measures. 

In preparation for the walkout, the Utica Academy for International Studies (UAIS) created a set of rules dictating what students could say during their political protest. The rules required the students to stick to “pre-identified chants” as they marched outside the school, and any posters they wished to carry during their walkout would need to be submitted to administrators for advance approval. Incredibly, the rules also provided that no “political messages” would be permitted. Several students who refused to be silenced by school administrators were suspended for peacefully participating in the walkout and holding up signs with political messages. 

In April 2018, the ACLU of Michigan wrote a letter to the school demanding that the suspensions be rescinded because UAIS’s rules against political speech during a demonstration were a blatant violation of the students’ clearly established constitutional rights to express their opinions on the critically important issue of gun control. UAIS responded promptly stating that it had removed the suspensions from the students’ permanent records, issued a public statement confirming its commitment to free speech rights of all its students, and promised to respect students’ First Amendment rights in the future. 

(ACLU Attorneys Michael J. Steinberg and Bonsitu Kitaba-Gaviglio.)

The ACLU of Michigan is the leading proponent of Promote the Vote, a proposed constitutional amendment to strengthen voting rights and modernize our election system in Michigan with no-reason absentee voting, same-day voter registration, and other important reforms. 

We helped collect over 430,000 petition signatures which is more than enough to guarantee a spot on the ballot in November 2018. However, when reviewing the petitions, the Bureau of Elections refused to count any signatures that its staff perceived to be different from the digitized signatures in the state’s qualified voter file (QVF), even though QVF signatures could be decades old and voters who are signing a petition are often in a rush and have no idea that their signatures are supposed to match. Moreover, experts recognize that unless multiple handwriting samples and specialized training are provided, signature comparisons are virtually standardless, highly unreliable, and should not be used in elections. 

In August 2018, the ACLU of Michigan filed an emergency lawsuit in federal court to stop the standardless signature comparison process and certify Promote the Vote for the ballot.  After we filed our lawsuit, the Bureau of Elections recommended that Promote the Vote be placed on the ballot. 

UPDATE: On November 6, 2018, Promote the Vote or Proposal Three based in 80 of Michigan's 83 counties.

(Promote the Vote v. Johnson; ACLU of Michigan Attorneys Sharon Dolente, Dan Korobkin, and Michael J. Steinberg; National ACLU Attorneys Julie Eberstein and Emily Zhang; Andrew Nickelhoff and Mary Ellen Gurewitz of Sachs Waldman.)