In 2021, a California elementary school punished a first-grader with an indefinite ban on drawing pictures at school and two weeks without recess.

The offense: Creating an innocent sketch for a classmate.

Moved by a classroom lesson on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Lives Matter movement, 7-year-old “B.B.” wanted to show love and support for a black classmate.

B.B. drew her friend a picture of four circles in different shades, representing her and three other children.

Above it, she wrote “Black Lives Mater [sic]” — and underneath that, the words “any life.”

What began as an act of love from one friend to another led to a phone call to the school, in which the classmate’s parents expressed concern that their daughter had been singled out for her race.

The parents did not ask for B.B. to be punished.

But the principal, Jesus Becerra, pulled B.B. aside and scolded her for drawing an “inappropriate” and “racist” picture, because she’d included the phrase “any life.”

Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals finally ended a years-long battle between B.B. and the school district.

Ruling in B.B.’s favor, the judges made it clear that students don’t lose their right to free speech just because they’re young — confirming that children do, in fact, enjoy the freedom to speak their little minds.

The decision vacated a lower court’s judgment that gave school administrators unchecked authority to punish student speech.

B.B. had never been exposed to the political firestorm that was then blazing over the phrase “all lives matter.”

Yet adults were all too eager to turn her note into an ideological flashpoint.

Becerra, after meting out his punishment, also ordered the bewildered child to apologize to her classmate — who was equally confused to receive the apology.

The school’s overreaction made B.B. believe she had done something awful.

Filled with shame, she never told her mom and dad.

No one from the school ever informed B.B.’s parents about the incident; in fact, her mother, Chelsea Boyle, didn’t find out about it until another parent told her a year later.

Once she did, Boyle was shocked — and horrified that her daughter had carried the weight of needless guilt for so long.

She confronted the school and the district, but couldn’t get a straight answer about what had happened.

Ultimately, Becerra was placed in charge of an investigation that unsurprisingly cleared himself and the school of any wrongdoing.

Boyle wasn’t out to take a political stance; neither she nor her husband were politically active.

But she believed that her daughter had done nothing wrong — and that under the First Amendment, B.B. had the constitutional right to express herself.

When the family filed a lawsuit in US District Court, its judges granted summary judgment to the school district, holding that B.B.’s rights had not been violated and that she had no grounds to sue.

In essence, they ruled, elementary school students don’t have First Amendment rights — deriding the family’s claim as a “schoolyard dispute” that “does not warrant federal court intervention.”

But their ruling ignored a century of Supreme Court precedent to the contrary.

A student’s age doesn’t determine his or her right to free speech, as the court laid out in Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923 and confirmed in 1943’s West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.

In 1969, when the court reaffirmed that fundamental right for all ages in the landmark case Tinker v. Des Moines, Justice Abe Fortas famously wrote, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

B.B., represented at no cost by Pacific Legal Foundation, appealed the case to the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where the family was victorious last week.

But the battle has taken a toll.

The backlash they received forced the Boyles to move across the country and rebuild their lives.

Chelsea Boyle kept fighting.

“I wanted to leave this world a better place for my children, and I felt like I was going to leave it worse if I didn’t do it,” she said.

On appeal, the school district’s attorney argued that B.B.’s age meant her drawing was immune from First Amendment protection.

“We are not dealing with first graders who are engaged in discussions in the marketplace of ideas,” the lawyer said. “First graders are supposed to be learning to tie their shoes.”

“Then you don’t give a Black Lives Matter course to a first grader,” Judge Consuelo Callahan responded. “Maybe you teach tying shoes.”

Brittany E. Hunter is a writer at large for Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented B.B. in her lawsuit against Capistrano United School District.