The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California sued the Veterans Administration today for denying a 67-year-old Army veteran his free-speech right to protest the agency’s failure to use part of its property in west Los Angeles for the benefit and care of veterans, particularly those who are homeless.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles on behalf of Robert Rosebrock, who, along with other veterans, has protested the VA’s land-use policies every Sunday since March 9, 2008. During the protests, Rosebrock often displays the American flag upside down on a fence outside VA property in west Los Angeles as a distress symbol to draw attention to the group’s cause. On Feb. 28, VA police demanded that he remove the flag, and when Rosebrock refused, the police removed it themselves. A week earlier, VA police had allowed Rosebrock to display the flag right side up at the same site.

”The VA has shown a basic misunderstanding of the meaning of the First Amendment of the Constitution, the very document that Mr. Rosebrock and other veterans have served in the military to protect,” said Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney and Manheim Family Attorney for First Amendment Rights at the ACLU/SC. “The government cannot say it’s OK to hang the flag one way but not another just because the latter expresses a message that the government does not approve of.”

The recent harassment of Rosebrock by VA police continues a campaign by the VA of selective enforcement against him depending on how he displays the flag during his protests. For 66 weeks in a row, Rosebrock hung the flag right side up without any interference from the VA police. However, after he started hanging the flag upside down in June 2009, he was quickly cited six times for “unauthorized demonstration or service in a national cemetery or on other VA property.” Rosebrock also received an e-mail from Lynn Carrier, associate director of the Veterans Administration Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, which said in part that he and his fellow demonstrators “may not attach the American flag, upside down, in VA property including our perimeter gates.”

The VA eventually dismissed the citations against Rosebrock, but the recent action of the VA police in removing a flag that Rosebrock had hung upside down makes it clear that the agency’s unconstitutional policy of denying him his free speech rights continues.

The VA complex was specifically deeded to the United States in 1888 as a home for disabled veterans. Rosebrock and his fellow veterans demonstrate in front of a portion of the complex that the VA is planning to lease for use as a public park. Another portion of the land is now leased to a nearby private school for tennis courts, which veterans are not allowed to access. Other buildings on the land are leased for use as theaters. Rosebrock was particularly incensed last year when the VA allowed a “celebrity carnival” to take place on the property, at a time when there are more than 6,500 homeless veterans in Los Angeles, including some who sleep on the sidewalk adjacent to the VA land that has been leased to build a public park.

“Our protest is an outcry that sovereign and sacred land deeded for the use and care of veterans is being stolen away and leased to private, special interest groups with no transparency or accountability for the money generated,” Rosebrock said. "The U.S. Flag Code allows for the flag to be displayed upside down when property is in danger. It’s clear to us that this property is in danger, and has been for a long time.”
 

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
The nation's largest school system is reeling from a budget crisis, and the Los Angeles Unified School District is bracing for another round of layoffs. One school in Watts, Markham Middle School, has already lost half its teachers, and there may be more pink slips to come. That's where NPR's Ina Jaffe went for this story.
Mr. NICHOLAS MELVOIN (Teacher, Markham Middle School): Good morning, Maria. Good morning, Kyla(ph).
INA JAFFE: Students line up outside of Nicholas Melvoin's class as he greets each one of them by name.
Mr. MELVOIN: Morning, Ruby. Morning, Greg.
JAFFE: Melvoin teaches English as a Second Language in this school that's more than 70 percent Latino.
Mr. MELVOIN: Our class average for this test was a 86 percent. I still think we can do better, but I was proud.
JAFFE: Melvoin is just 24 years old. He's a Harvard graduate and began teaching right out of college.
Mr. MELVOIN: I was always interested growing up in education. I have a lot of teachers in my family, so I knew that I wanted to not only teach, but teach in a school like Markham in a community like Watts.
JAFFE: Which has four large public housing projects and dozens of gangs. A lot of the teachers who came here were, like Melvoin, young, idealistic and reform-minded. But because layoffs are decided on the basis of seniority, they were the first to go when the layoffs came last June. Melvoin is now one of about a dozen who came back to Markham as long-term substitutes.
Mr. MELVOIN: My job description didn't change. If anything, actually, my responsibilities increased. I became a department chair. So I came back and actually took on more leadership roles, even though I was being paid by the hour.
JAFFE: And getting no sick days or vacation pay. Markham Middle School has had to get by with a lot of subs this year, but not all are familiar faces like Melvoin.
Ms. CHERELLE REED(ph) (Student, Markham Middle School): In my history class this year, we had so many different substitutes, it was a blur. They write their name on the board, and the next day, it would be gone, and so were they.
JAFFE: That's Markham eighth grader Cherelle Reed. She's a plaintiff in a lawsuit that claims that teacher layoffs have had a far greater impact on schools that serve poor communities. She spoke at a news conference at the school.
Ms. REED: It's not fair for my school to lose so many teachers. It feels like we're at a lower-class school, and we're not thought about as much as other schools.
Mr. TIM SULLIVAN (Principal, Markham Middle School): When I came on board, I had a young individual come to me and ask me: So how long will be here? And that just hit me like a ton of bricks.
JAFFE: Tim Sullivan became principal of Markham in 2008. He was hired to lead a reform effort after the school became one of a dozen taken over by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. New teachers embrace reform, he says, and the school reinforced that with special training.
Mr. SULLIVAN: One of the things that hurts us again financially is we invest professional development - thousands of dollars into these teachers and programs, and that training goes right out the window. And then it's, you know, training a new batch.
JAFFE: And veteran teachers, says Sullivan, are not jumping at the chance to work at Markham.
Mr. SULLIVAN: As we started the school year, I still have open positions.
JAFFE: So, he hired teachers who'd been pushed out of their old jobs at other schools, but they changed their minds.
Mr. SULLIVAN: Because folks had gone home, looked up Markham on the Internet, did their research, they chose to send in letters of resignation, never even arriving on my campus.
JAFFE: It was almost Christmas before all the positions at Markham were filled with either full-time teachers or long-term subs.
Mr. MELVOIN: Who can raise their hand and remind me what genre means. What is genre?
JAFFE: Nichole Melvoin now counts as one of the full-time teachers. He was reinstated in January, but expects to be laid off again in June.
Ina Jaffe, NPR News.
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