Cedar Rapids schools deletes ‘Celebrating Pride’ Facebook post over disparaging comments

CEDAR RAPIDS — Comments criticizing the Cedar Rapids Community School District for recognizing Pride Month and disparaging LGBTQ people remained on the district’s official Facebook page for days before school officials — facing criticism over the comments while they worked with lawyers — removed the entire post this week.

On June 1, the district posted a short item — “Celebrating Pride” was all it said — to mark the month when pride celebrations and parades are held nationwide, including locally. The post, along with comments later made on it, was removed Tuesday.

Caitlin Wiedenheft, spokeswoman for the school district, said district leaders worked with their legal counsel and determined the post would be removed altogether “so no comments could be made by anyone.”

The district is reviewing its social media guidelines, including considering disabling comments on any social media posts in the future, Wiedenheft said in a statement.

While individuals are free to delete comments or posts on their own social media pages, it is another matter for governments and public officials. Governments can face free speech repercussions if they delete selective comments that don’t seem to violate posted guidelines.

The district “recognizes that, while there are benefits to sharing information with the school community via social media, there can also be challenges that arise when people have the ability to interact through comments,” Wiedenheft said.

Stefanie Munsterman, executive director of the Cedar Rapids Civil Rights Commission, emailed district officials June 7 asking that some of the more harmful comments on the post be deleted. The email was obtained by The Gazette through a public records request to the Cedar Rapids Civil Rights Commission.

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“Students need to feel protected and affirmed and the pride post should not be used as a platform to attack youth,” Munsterman said in her email to school leaders.

School board member Dexter Merschbrock said in a June 7 email to board leadership — shared with The Gazette — that the harmful comments should be removed by the district. Other people on Facebook also commented on the original post, asking for the harmful comments to be removed.

“People are specifically asking for them to be and there is no compelling reason to keep them up,” he said in his email.

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But the incident posed a First Amendment question for the district: If comments on a government post were deleted, would it violate an individual’s right to free speech?

Under the district’s community guidelines on Facebook, the district legally might not be able to delete harmful comments, according to a post on ACLU Iowa’s website, “What to do if you’re censored by a public official on social media.”

Elected officials cannot delete comments or block users based on the content of the speech on their official government social media accounts, said Rita Bettis Austen, American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa legal director. The Cedar Rapids Community School District’s Facebook page is considered an official government account.

Government officials can, however, enforce a content-neutral and viewpoint-neutral social media policy that they have adopted, Bettis Austen said in a statement.

The school district’s guidelines on Facebook says it can delete submissions that:

The community guidelines, however, do not say anything about comments that contain references to sexual orientation, sexual identity or the LGBTQ community.

“We don’t want to put anyone in a legally unsafe situation, recognizing people do have First Amendment rights,” Munsterman said in an interview with The Gazette.

However, Munsterman said the school district’s community guidelines do say that “blatantly inaccurate information will not be allowed. False information will be removed and factual information will be posted.” Some of the comments posted under the “Celebrating Pride” post were factually inaccurate, Munsterman said.

Munsterman said the Cedar Rapids Civil Rights Commission has dealt with similar harmful comments on its Facebook page. However, the commission’s guidelines on Facebook say that no comments are allowed that perpetuate discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or familial status.

These guidelines were created in 2009 with the assistance of legal counsel, Munsterman said. They were last revised in 2020, she said.

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Jessica Camacho, a former teacher in the Cedar Rapids Community School District, addressed the school board Monday during public comment, saying the impact of the Facebook dialogue was “dangerous.”

“The Cedar Rapids Community School District gave a platform for hate despite having genuine guidelines that state hateful comments are not to be accepted,” Camacho said.

Camacho, who now is an investigator with the Cedar Rapids Civil Rights Commission, said the district needs to be more proactive in supporting students and staff in the LGBTQ community.

“If you’re going to be reactive you have to listen to the people who are experiencing the harm,” Camacho told The Gazette.

People in the LGBTQ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) experience discrimination, are marginalized, bullied, harassed, mistreated, stigmatized and met with violence, Munsterman said in her email to the school district.

As Iowa leaders in the statehouse continue to propose and pass bills “attacking LGBTQ rights,” the district needs to do a better job of supporting its students and staff, Munsterman said.

LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers, according to The Trevor Project, which advocates, educates and supports LGBTQ youth.

The Trevor Project’s national research consistently finds that LGBTQ young people report lower rates of attempting suicide when they have access to LGBTQ-affirming spaces. However, only 55 percent of LGBTQ youth report that their school is LGBTQ-affirming.

“A school district’s responsibility is to educate kids,” Munsterman said. “We know if kids are being bullied or harassed, education will take a back seat, and they are just worrying about their existence … Allowing the comments to remain is just another death by 1,000 cuts.”

Comments: (319) 398-8411; grace.king@thegazette.com