Cheerleader’s suit over profane Snapchat post heads to SCOTUS

A civil rights battle over the profane Snapchat posts of a disgruntled Pennsylvania high school cheerleader has gone to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In agreeing to hear an appeal by Mahanoy Area School District, the justices will take up the issue of whether school officials have the right to discipline students for off-campus, after-school comments or if such speech is completely protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Mahanoy district officials asked the nation’s highest court to address the case after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled in June that they had violated the junior varsity cheerleader’s free speech rights by suspending her from the team because of her Snapchat comments.

The teen, who is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, posted those comments after failing to make the varsity squad. Her Snapchat message stated, “[Expletive] school, [expletive] softball, [expletive] cheer, [expletive] everything.”

That led to the girl being suspended from the junior varsity squad and her parents filing a lawsuit. She was reinstated under a temporary restraining order and graduated in 2019. The circuit judges found district officials had no right to discipline the girl over opinions she expressed online to her friends while out of school and on her own time. Their ruling backed an earlier decision by U.S. Middle District Senior Judge A. Richard Caputo. “As arms of the state, public schools have an interest in teaching civility by example, persuasion, and encouragement, but they may not leverage the coercive power with which they have been entrusted to do so,” Judge Cheryl Ann Krause wrote in the circuit court’s opinion. “Otherwise, we give school administrators the power to quash student expression deemed crude or offensive, which far too easily metastasizes into the power to censor valuable speech and legitimate criticism.”

In seeking Supreme Court review, the school district asked the justices to address whether a 1969 high court decision “which holds that public school officials may regulate speech that would materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school, applies to student speech that occurs off campus.”

The district’s attorneys insisted in their petition that “schools’ ability to maintain order within the schoolhouse gates should not disappear just because the disruption originates off campus.” The school district’s stance is supported by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association and the Pennsylvania Principals Association.

The cheerleader and her parents, meanwhile, are framing the issue before the justices whether the district violated her free speech rights “when it punished a student for her colorful expression of frustration, made in an ephemeral Snapchat on her personal social media, on a weekend, off campus, containing no threat or harassment or mention of her school, and that did not cause or threaten any disruption of her school.”

To rule otherwise would set a suffocating precedent, the girl’s lawyers claim in a brief filed with the Supreme Court.

“Permitting school officials to regulate student expression that occurs on a weekend, off-campus, with no specific connection to the school would severely diminish students’ free-speech rights in the world at large,” they wrote. “The school district’s argument would apply with equal force had [she] simply voiced her frustration to a group of friends while hanging out on the weekend and had one of the friends then reported it to the school. Surely such speech could not be punished.”