[JURIST] The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit [official website; JURIST news archive] on Friday ruled [opinion, PDF] that a Minnesota school district must give a student group advocating gay rights [JURIST news archive] the same access to school facilities as other groups. Two students belonging to Straights and Gays for Equality (SAGE) sued the Osseo Area School District [official website] under the federal Equal Access Act (EAA) [text], which prohibits secondary public schools from discriminating against student groups on the basis of the religious, political, philosophical or other content of their speech. The plaintiffs alleged that administrators at Maple Grove High School (MGHS) [school website] had violated the EAA by designating SAGE as "noncurricular" and prohibiting it from raising money, taking field trips and using school-sponsored avenues of communication - privileges given to curriculum-related groups. The school district appealed a district court order granting a permanent injunction under which SAGE was to have "the same access for meetings, avenues of communication, and other miscellaneous rights" as curricular groups. Affirming the district court, Circuit Judge Lavenski R. Smith [official profile] wrote for a three-judge panel:

Here, MGHS does not prohibit SAGE from meeting at the school or utilizing some avenues of communication, but it limits SAGE's access to communication avenues and meeting times and places. Curricular groups receive more extensive use of school communication avenues. Thus, the issue is not whether MGHS provides SAGE access to some avenues of communication but whether it provides equal access to available avenues of communication as provided to other noncurriculum related groups. We hold that it does not.