Student’s Snapchat profanity leads to free speech case

Brandi Levy, 14, was having that kind of day where she just wanted to scream. So she did, in a profanity-laced posting on Snapchat that has, improbably, ended up before the Supreme Court in the most significant case on student speech in more than 50 years.

At issue is whether public schools can discipline students over something they say off-campus. The topic is especially meaningful in a time of remote learning because of the coronavirus pandemic and a rising awareness of the pernicious effects of online bullying.

Arguments are on Wednesday, via telephone because of the pandemic, before a court on which several justices have school-age children or recently did.

The case has its roots in the Vietnam-era case of a high school in Des Moines, Iowa, that suspended students who wore armbands to protest the war. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court sided with the students, declaring students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Ever since, courts have wrestled with the contours of the decision in Tinker v. Des Moines in 1969.

Levy’s case has none of the lofty motives of Tinker and more than its share of teenage angst.

Levy and a friend were at a convenience store in her hometown of Mahanoy City, Schuylkill County, when she took to social media to express her frustration at being kept on her high school’s junior varsity cheerleading squad for another year.

“F school f softball f cheer f everything,” Levy wrote, in a post that also contained a photo in which she and a classmate raised their middle fingers.

The post was brought to the attention of the team’s coaches, who suspended Levy from the cheerleading team for a year.

Levy, now 18, is finishing her freshman year in college.

“I was a 14-year-old kid. I was upset, I was angry. Everyone, every 14-year-old kid speaks like that at one point,” she said in an interview.

Her parents knew nothing about the Snapchat post until she was suspended, she said.

“My parents were more concerned on how I was feeling,” Levy said, adding she wasn’t grounded or otherwise punished for what she did.

Instead, her parents filed a federal lawsuit, claiming the suspension violated their daughter’s constitutional speech rights.

Lower courts agreed and restored her to the cheerleading team. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia held that “Tinker does not apply to off-campus speech.” The court said it was leaving for another day “the First Amendment implications of off-campus student speech that threatens violence or harasses others.”

But the school district, education groups, the Biden administration and antibullying organizations said in court filings that the appeals court went too far.

“The First Amendment does not categorically prohibit public schools from disciplining students for speech that occurs off campus,” acting Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote on behalf of the administration.