The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a Pennsylvania high school violated the First Amendment rights of a cheerleader by suspending her from her team for using vulgar language that criticized the school on social media.
The 8-1 opinion upheld lower court rulings against Mahanoy Area High School's decision to suspend then-student Brandi Levy from her junior varsity cheerleading squad over two Snapchat posts she sent while off school grounds.
The justices had weighed whether a 1969 court decision, which held that public schools have the ability to regulate certain speech, applied in this case, when the speech had occurred off campus.
The decision Wednesday said "courts must be more skeptical of a school's efforts to regulate off-campus speech, for doing so may mean the student cannot engage in that kind of speech at all."
"The school itself has an interest in protecting a student's unpopular expression, especially when the expression takes place off campus," because "America's public schools are the nurseries of democracy," wrote Justice Stephen Breyer in the majority opinion.
Levy, whose name is abbreviated "B.L." in the case, as a high school sophomore in 2017 failed to make her school's varsity cheerleading team. While at a Cocoa Hut convenience store over the weekend following her rejection, she posted two messages on Snapchat venting her frustration.
"F--- school f--- softball f--- cheer f--- everything," she wrote in the first Snap, which showed an image of Levy and a friend with their middle fingers raised.
The second image included a caption, which read, "Love how me and [another student] get told we need a year of jv before we make varsity but tha[t] doesn't matter to anyone else?" That post also showed an upside-down smiley-face emoji.
The messages were flagged to the school's cheerleading coaches and its principal, who determined they violated the rules and moved to suspend Levy from the squad for the upcoming year.
Breyer outlined three features of off-campus speech that "often, even if not always, distinguish schools' efforts to regulate that speech from their efforts to regulate on-campus speech."
Those features are: that a school rarely stands in the place of the student's parent when the student is off campus; that the school has a "heavy burden" of justifying intervention in students' speech off campus; and that schools, as "nurseries of democracy," have an interest in protecting unpopular expression, especially when it takes place off school grounds.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in his lone dissent, wrote that "the majority fails to consider whether schools often will have more authority, not less, to discipline students who transmit speech through social media."
Thomas, who turned 73 on Wednesday, explained that since speech made through social media can be seen and shared on campus, "it often will have a greater proximate tendency to harm the school environment than will an off-campus in-person conversation."
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