But the new boundaries on student speech set by the court could have implications for students around the country-particularly for what they say online. So far the courts have sided with Levy, saying the school overstepped its authority by punishing her. (The legal team representing the school district didn’t respond to a request for comment.) “I think the boundaries have been unclear for a long time,” said Sara Rose, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, who’s representing Levy in the case. And one University of Tennessee student sued this year after being punished for risqué social media posts. In one high-profile example from this year, the University of Oregon changed its disciplinary policy to explicitly include off-campus actions after photos of parties during the pandemic were posted to social media, raising concerns that the policy unconstitutionally stepped into students’ private lives.
The issue extends to higher education, too. After years of back and forth, appeals courts eventually found that the schools overstepped, but the Supreme Court denied requests to hear these cases. In two similar cases from the mid-2000s, Pennsylvania students were punished by their schools for making parodic MySpace profiles of their principals. Schools, without a definitive answer, have often forged their own paths. I think the boundaries have been unclear for a long time. If a student is harassing or threatening other students, for example, that likely steps over the line.īut does that power extend to speech that happens off-campus? And in the social media age, what does that even mean? That’s the focus of Mahanoy. If a student’s speech causes “substantial disruption” to the school environment, the court said, the school is within its rights to discipline that student. Still, while students have a right to express their options, there are limits to that right. Des Moines Independent Community School District, that students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” The students filed a First Amendment suit and, after taking the case to the Supreme Court, eventually won. ↩︎ link What Does the Law Say About Student Speech Right Now?Īnswering that means taking a step back to 1965, when a group of Des Moines students were disciplined for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.
Since then, Levy and her family have been waging a legal battle to reinstate Levy, arguing that the Mahanoy Area School District violated her First Amendment rights. Levy was suspended from the team for her sophomore year, with the coaches saying Levy had violated the team’s rules against respecting the school and avoiding “foul language and inappropriate gestures.” The message was broadcast to Levy’s friends, and soon a screenshot made its way back to the school’s cheer coaches. She posted a photo to Snapchat with a friend and declared, “Fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything.” Disappointed, she ended up doing what so many teens do: venting on social media. But after trying out, she still only made the JV team.
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Levy had made her school’s junior varsity cheerleading team freshman year, with hopes to make the full varsity team as a sophomore. Brandi Levy was a Pennsylvania high school student when she sent a fateful, expletive-filled Snapchat in 2017.
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