No. 23-1817

KARI MACRAE,

Plaintiff, Appellant,

v.

MATTHEW MATTOS; MATTHEW A. FERRON; HANOVER PUBLIC SCHOOLS,

Defendants, Appellees.

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS

[Hon. Denise J. Casper, U.S. District Judge]

Before

Gelpí, Selya, and Thompson, Circuit Judges.

Michael Bekesha, with whom Judicial Watch, Inc. was on brief, for appellant. Gregor A. Pagnini, with whom Leonard H. Kesten, Deidre Brennan Regan, and Brody, Hardoon, Perkins & Kesten LLP were on brief, for appellees.

June 28, 2024 THOMPSON, Circuit Judge. Today's appeal was brought by Kari MacRae ("MacRae"), a former teacher at Hanover High School ("Hanover High") in Hanover, Massachusetts, against Hanover High's principal Matthew Mattos ("Mattos"), Hanover High's superintendent Matthew A. Ferron ("Ferron"), and Hanover Public Schools ("the District" and, collectively with Mattos and Ferron, "Defendants"). And here's the CliffsNotes' version of how the parties made it to our bench: MacRae posted six allegedly controversial memes to her personal TikTok account.1 A few months after posting the first few of the six memes, she interviewed for a teaching position at Hanover High and got the job. Soon after starting there, MacRae's TikTok posts came to light and things hit the proverbial fan. Concluding that to "continu[e] [her] employment in light of [her] social media posts would have a significant negative impact on student learning" at Hanover High, Defendants terminated MacRae's employment.

Positive that Defendants had unconstitutionally retaliated against her for exercising her First Amendment rights,

1 For those readers who don't keep up with the social-media trends of the day, "meme" is defined as either "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture" or "an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media," Simpson v. Tri-Valley Cmty. Unit Sch. Dist. No. 3, 470 F. Supp. 3d 863, 866 n.3 (C.D. Ill. 2020), and "TikTok is a video-sharing social-media platform," Couture v. Noshirvan, No. 23-cv-340, 2023 WL 8280955, at *1 (M.D. Fla. Nov. 30, 2023).

- 2 - MacRae took them to court. But Defendants didn't agree with her take on things, and neither did the district court, which granted their motion for summary judgment. Now on appeal, MacRae implores us to do some course correction and fix what she says the district court got wrong. After taking the time to carefully review both sides' arguments, however, we conclude that the district court got it right. In other words, we affirm, but before explaining our reasons for doing so, a bit of factual and procedural table-setting is in order.

TABLE-SETTING

To begin, we set the table with a factual and procedural summary of how the parties got here. And as this is an appeal of the grant a motion for summary judgment, we lay out the facts in the light kindest to the nonmovant (here, MacRae), drawing all reasonable inferences in her favor but only to the extent such inferences are supported by the record. Hamdallah v. CPC Carolina PR, LLC, 91 F.4th 1, 8 n.1 (1st Cir. 2024). The following facts are uncontested, unless indicated otherwise.

The TikTok Posts

MacRae is a Bourne, Massachusetts resident, who started working as a teacher in 2015 and has held several teaching positions since then. In or around 2019, she created her own