At Hollywood High School - perhaps the most celebrity-packed campus in the country - it takes a lot for an educator to attract attention. But literature teacher Hildreth Simmons still manages to raise eyebrows, not so much with words as with her wardrobe.

Just about every day, Ms. Simmons shows up in her southern California classroom wearing a T-shirt with a provocative message like "War Without End? Not in Our Name" or "A Woman's Place Is in Her Union."

Her goal, she says, is to get students to ponder issues like labor rights, world affairs or, nowadays, the war in Iraq. "I am trying to provoke thought, and discussion," says Simmons. "I'd like them to think."

Simmons and her T-shirts have stayed out of trouble, but some of her colleagues haven't been so fortunate. Across the country, debates about the role of the war in the classroom have pitted outspoken teachers against parents, administrators, and, potentially, the courts. At issue: What rights do teachers give up when they report to work?

"There's got to be some First Amendment protection and academic freedom for teachers," says Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the nonpartisan First Amendment Center. "The question is how much."

The first dust-ups over the war and teachers came in early 2003. As the nation prepared to enter combat, teachers complained they weren't welcome to express their opinions through buttons, pins, and posters. In the Chicago suburb of Evanston, according to one news report, a high school actually banned teachers from wearing war-related buttons.

The role of educators came under the spotlight again in May when high school teachers in several states - including Texas, California and Alabama - came under fire for allowing students to watch the full video of the decapitation of Nicholas Berg, an American visitor to Iraq.

Those teachers appear to have attracted little support from their colleagues and legal precedent suggests they would find little support in the courts.

Although judges have expanded the concept of "academic freedom" beyond college professors to schoolteachers, they didn't transfer it whole. Educators don't have much leeway to present material deemed to be inappropriate for the maturity level of students, nor can they ignore the required curriculum or discuss irrelevant topics.

But school districts aren't all-powerful. In 1969, the US Supreme Court weighed in on campus free-speech rights in a famous case involving three Iowa students who wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. While the case is often cited as providing protections for schoolchildren, it did the same for teachers. The court said "it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

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