Former Maryland student school board members lead nationwide effort to weigh in on Supreme Court case

Three former student school board members from Maryland are leading an effort to influence a Supreme Court case they say could have significant implications on students’ right to free speech.

A group led by Baltimore County’s Noureen Badwi and Montgomery County’s Matt Post and Eric Guerci filed an amicus brief Wednesday in hopes of affecting the court’s decision on Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., a case that goes before the high court later this month.

The court will determine whether a public school district has the power to discipline a student, in this case a 14-year-old girl from Pennsylvania who in 2017 made vulgar comments on Snapchat about school and the cheerleading team, for off-campus speech.

The amicus brief, filed by Washington-based law firm Deutsch Hunt, is a request by a third party for the Supreme Court to consider the group’s perspective. The brief argues that the punishment levied against the student — a one-year ban from participating on the cheerleading team — violates her First Amendment rights since the speech was nonviolent and occurred off campus.

Joining for the brief were 192 current and former student members from 28 states and territories — including 67 from Maryland.

Among the 67 amici are current and former student school board members from 18 of Maryland’s 25 school boards, including 13 from Howard, 10 from Montgomery, eight from Baltimore County and seven from Anne Arundel. The current State Board of Education student member, Jason Wu, signed onto the brief as well.

The group hopes the high court upholds the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling last spring in favor of the student.

“Of course, schools should be able to discipline students for bullying, harassment and threats of violence on or off campus. But the rule the school district is proposing here goes way too far,” said Post, a junior at Yale and the 2017-2018 Montgomery County student school board member.

“The [Mahanoy Area] school district is suggesting they should be able to discipline students for anything they say that involves the school. We’re arguing, from our perspective as student policymakers, that kind of rule would kill profoundly necessary speech — speech that not only student members need to hear, but all school board members need to hear in order to make sound, informed decisions on policy matters before them.”

Badwi, Post and Guerci organized the brief that includes current and former student members from Alaska to California to Guam.

“We saw an opportunity for our unique perspective to be valuable in shaping the court’s opinion,” said Guerci, a senior at Princeton who served as Montgomery’s student member from 2015 to 2017.

The brief, Post and Guerci say, is the first nationwide effort of this magnitude by student school board members. They said they were motivated by an amicus brief that was filed in a Howard County Circuit Court case in February. Two parents had sued the Howard County Board of Education over the voting rights of its student members, arguing it violated Maryland’s constitution.

More than 100 former and current student members in Maryland joined to file an amicus brief, saying the parents’ lawsuit was an “egregious attack” on student representation. The parents lost the lawsuit in late March.

“We mobilized very quickly,” said Badwi, who was also one of the organizers for the amicus brief in Howard County. “The impact we had in the [Howard County] lawsuit to find and mobilize so many student members of the board throughout history made us realize the power that we could have at the Supreme Court.”

The story of Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. begins in 2017.

A freshman at Mahanoy Area High School didn’t make the varsity cheerleading team. One Saturday night, outside a convenience store, she posted a photo of herself and a friend on the social messaging platform Snapchat holding their middle fingers up with the caption: “F—- school, f—- softball, f—- cheer, f—- everything.” She posted another snap that day bemoaning why she and a friend had to stay on the junior varsity cheerleading team while other underclassmen made varsity.

Both Snapchats were deleted within 24 hours, but the cheerleading coaches suspended her for the year, citing team rules.

The student sued the school district, and the case made it to the Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit last June.The appellate court said the First Amendment did not allow public schools to punish students for speech when off school grounds. The district challenged the ruling to the Supreme Court.

“We have to think of this as not only one incident at one school in one cheerleading club, but instead as all speech at all schools in all states,” said Guerci. “This isn’t about whether ‘B.L.’ should have been removed from the cheerleading team or not but about whether generations to come will have the ability to speak freely off campus.”

The Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments April 28.