SCOTUS Takes Cheerleader's Free Speech Case

We will be discussing this case this semester.The Gotham Times has the story.

Here is the money quote:

It was a Saturday in the spring of 2017, and a ninth-grade student in Pennsylvania was having a bad day. She had just learned that she had failed to make the varsity cheerleading squad and would remain on junior varsity.

The student expressed her frustration on social media, sending a message on Snapchat to about 250 friends. The message included an image of the student and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with text expressing a similar sentiment. Using a curse word four times, the student expressed her dissatisfaction with “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything.”

Though Snapchat messages are ephemeral by design, another student took a screenshot of this one and showed it to her mother, a coach. The school suspended the student from cheerleading for a year, saying the punishment was needed to “avoid chaos” and maintain a “teamlike environment.”

The student sued the school district, winning a sweeping victory in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia. The court said the First Amendment did not allow public schools to punish students for speech outside school grounds.

Next month, at its first private conference after the holiday break, the Supreme Court will consider whether to hear the case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., No. 20-255. The Third Circuit’s ruling is in tension with decisions from several other courts, and such splits often invite Supreme Court review.

 

And here is another description of the case:

 With their announcement that they had granted review in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., the justices returned to the often-complicated question of student speech rights. Over 50 years ago, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court ruled that although students have First Amendment rights while they are at school, school officials can regulate speech that would substantially disrupt the school’s work. On Friday the justices agreed to decide whether their decision in Tinker applies to student speech that occurs off campus. The question comes to the court in the case of a Pennsylvania student who was removed from her high school’s junior varsity cheerleading team when, after failing to make the varsity team, she posted offensive Snapchat messages. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled for the student, holding that Tinker does not allow schools to punish off-campus speech. The school district asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, which it agreed to do on Friday.