I would be curious to know why the student and his sister felt "harassed". There is more to this story, I think.
One possibility is that they were in fact being harassed. If so then the student was exercising his own free speech and not merely acting as a pawn. (It is impossible for the judge to legitimately conclude the student was merely acting as a pawn. How could he possibly know that?)
You certainly don't owe respect to authority figures who harass you. Some comments to the articles suggest the superintendent had a grudge against the mother and had been taking it out on the kids. What's clear is that there's a lot of nasty small town politics in this, and we can't know the whole truth, and probably shouldn't bother trying. And in all sized towns, there are a lot of idiots and jerks running schools, which is the real lesson in all of this.
