Opinion ID: 533845
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Considering speech as a unitary whole or as separate component items of speech

Text: 19 Plaintiff's crusade to change the school board's medication policy stretched over several months and involved multiple incidents, some of which were more deserving of protection than others. 5 However, the district court considered plaintiff's entire activity as a unitary whole and performed a single Pickering balancing analysis. Potentially different results might be obtained if each individual incident was weighed separately against the disruption caused by that particular incident. Although a small portion of speech taken by itself may be protectable under Pickering, when the speech in its totality is considered it might not be protected. See, e.g., Berry v. Baily, 726 F.2d 670, 676 (11th Cir.1984) (Combining one remark unrelated to plaintiff's job as deputy sheriff with other remarks that did relate to the plaintiff's job for the purpose of performing a single Pickering balancing analysis because all the remarks were related to the disciplinary structure of plaintiff's job), cert. denied, 471 U.S. 1101, 105 S.Ct. 2326, 85 L.Ed.2d 844 (1985). Thus, we must first decide whether the Pickering balancing test should be applied to plaintiff's speech, considered as a whole, or whether each instance of speech should be balanced separately. See Eiland v. City of Montgomery, 797 F.2d 953, 957 (11th Cir.1986) (district court reversed for improperly dividing a poem into protected and unprotected stanzas before performing the Pickering balance test), cert. denied, 483 U.S. 1020, 107 S.Ct. 3263, 97 L.Ed.2d 762 (1987). 20 The issue of whether speech involving multiple incidents or subjects should be considered separately in applying the Pickering balancing test arises in a wide spectrum of circumstances. At one extreme is the situation where there is a single instance of speech that touches on interrelated subjects. Because of the difficulty in determining the impact of a portion of a single instance of speech without examining the entire instance, [t]he task under Pickering is ... to determine whether the employee's interests in the speech as a whole outweigh the public employer's interests. Eiland v. City of Montgomery, 797 F.2d 953, 957 (11th Cir.1986), cert. denied, 483 U.S. 1020, 107 S.Ct. 3263, 97 L.Ed.2d 762 (1987) (emphasis added). 21 [A]ny such instances of speech should not be broken down into separate pieces of protected and nonprotected speech, but should rather be treated as protected speech for the purposes of the Pickering balance and the causation determination. In other words, when undertaking the Pickering balancing equation, the district court may take into account the fact that not all of the speech may have been protected. 22 Kurtz v. Vickrey, 855 F.2d 723, 733 (11th Cir.1988). 23 Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138, 103 S.Ct. 1684, 75 L.Ed.2d 708 (1983), is an example of a court considering speech as a whole even though portions of the speech did not touch on matters of public concern. In Connick, an assistant district attorney was discharged after distributing a multi-question questionnaire concerning office policy, morale, and employee confidence in supervisors. The Court determined that only the question asking whether employees felt pressured to work in political campaigns touched on a matter of public concern. Nevertheless, the Court went on to consider the entire questionnaire in balancing the interests. 461 U.S. at 149-54, 103 S.Ct. at 1691-94. The Court held that because the questionnaire touched upon matters of public concern in only a most limited sense the employer could discharge the employee for speech which he reasonably believed would disrupt the office. Connick, 461 U.S. at 154, 103 S.Ct. at 1693. 24 Courts have cited Connick for the proposition that a single instance of speech should not be divided for purposes of applying the Pickering balance. See, e.g., Hesse v. Board of Educ., 848 F.2d 748, 753 n. 4 (7th Cir.1988), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 109 S.Ct. 1128, 103 L.Ed.2d 190 (1989); Eiland v. City of Montgomery, 797 F.2d 953, 957 (11th Cir.1986), cert. denied, 483 U.S. 1020, 107 S.Ct. 3263, 97 L.Ed.2d 762 (1987). In Connick, the Court applied the Pickering balancing test to the survey as a whole, rather than to the single question relating to a matter of public concern. Kurtz, 855 F.2d at 732 n. 7 (emphasis in original). 25 At the other end of the spectrum is the situation where the court must consider multiple instances of speech, each dealing with separate subjects. There, the court may treat each instance of speech separately in applying the Pickering balance. See Kurtz v. Vickrey, 855 F.2d 723, 732-33 (11th Cir.1988). 26 Between those two situations lies less clear circumstances where the speech involves one instance but multiple distinct subjects or the speech involves multiple instances but only one subject. Under those circumstances, the question of whether speech should be balanced separately is fact sensitive and depends on how interrelated are the different aspects of the speech. Factors that could be considered in determining whether the speech is interrelated include the time frame in which the speech occurred, the different audiences to which the speech may have been directed, the continuity of the speech, and the degree to which the different aspects of speech built upon each other to create a cumulative impact on the state employer. 27 Kurtz v. Vickrey, 855 F.2d 723 (11th Cir.1988), is an example of how the time frame of the speech was considered by the court in permitting the division of different instances of speech. In Kurtz, a university professor filed suit because he was denied a promotion allegedly in violation of his First Amendment rights. The speech in question involved several instances over many years concerning different subjects of varying degrees of importance. In part because of the number of years in which the speech occurred, the court in Kurtz upheld the district court's decision to separate the speech for purposes of conducting the Pickering balancing test. Id. at 732-33. 28 In Hesse v. Board of Education, 848 F.2d 748 (7th Cir.1988), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 109 S.Ct. 1128, 103 L.Ed.2d 190 (1989), the court held that a teacher's transfer in status was warranted by the school's interest in discipline. The speech involved in Hesse included multiple memoranda to school officials. The court found that only one of the memoranda arguably touched on a matter of public concern. Id. at 752. However, the court did not merely view the memorandum in isolation but also considered the memorandum from the vantage point of its cumulative disruptive effect on the Board's ability to maintain harmony and discipline in the workplace. Id. at 753 n. 4 (emphasis added); see also Berry v. Baily, 726 F.2d 670, 676 (11th Cir.1984) (five instances of speech considered jointly because they were part of a set of actions posing a threat to the disciplinary structure), cert. denied, 471 U.S. 1101, 105 S.Ct. 2326, 85 L.Ed.2d 844 (1985). 29 In this case, plaintiff's speech consisted of multiple instances addressing the same issue of the medication policy. Although the speech spanned several months, plaintiff was actively pursuing her concerns throughout that period. Most importantly, the different instances of plaintiff's speech built on each other to such an extent that it is difficult to separate the impact of one instance from the impact of another. It is difficult to determine whether the other school nurses feared that plaintiff was jeopardizing their nursing licenses because plaintiff sent them information that she had received from her contacts with outside agencies, because of the publicity she was generating in part through false accusations, because of her threats to turn in a nurse, or because of plaintiff's conduct during the monthly nursing meetings. Therefore, because the speech was a concerted, cohesive campaign on a single subject, the speech should be considered in its entirety for purposes of the Pickering balancing test.