The New York Times
A cheerful message from a cheerleader asking for a first edit
WASHINGTON – It was a Saturday in the spring of 2017, and a ninth-grader in Pennsylvania had a bad day. She had just learned that she could not pick up the cheerleader group from the varsity group and that she would stay at junior university. The student expressed her frustration on social media and sent a message on Snapchat to about 250 friends. The message contains an image of the student and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with text expressing a similar sentiment. Using a swear word four times, the student expressed her dissatisfaction with ‘school’, ‘softball’, ‘cheering’ and ‘everything’. Sign up for The New York Times The Morning Newsletter Although Snapchat messages are short-lived, another student takes a screenshot of this one and shows it to her mother, a coach. The school suspended the student from cheerleading for a year, saying the punishment was necessary to ‘avoid chaos’ and’ maintain a ‘team environment’. The student sued the school district and achieved a comprehensive victory in the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The court said the first amendment did not allow public schools to punish students for their speech outside the school grounds. Next month, during the first private conference after the holiday, the Supreme Court will consider hearing the case, Mahanoy Area School District v. BL, no. 20-255. The decision of the 3rd Circuit is in tension with rulings of several other courts, and such dividing lines often invite the Supreme Court’s review. In appealing to the judges to hear the case, the school district said administrators across the country needed a firm ruling from the Supreme Court on their power to discipline students for what they say from school. “The demand that is being offered is constantly repeated and has become even more urgent because COVID-19 has forced schools to work online,” a commission for the school district said. “Only this court can resolve this threshold of the first amendment, which calms the country’s nearly 100,000 public schools.” Justin Driver, a law professor at Yale and author of “The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind,” agreed to some extent with the school district. ” “It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this constitutional question,” he said. But he added that schools do no business to tell students what they can say if they were not in school. “In the modern era, a huge percentage of underage speeches take place on campus, but online,” he said. “Judicial decisions that allow schools to regulate off-campus speeches that criticize public schools are opposed to the first amendment. Such decisions empower schools to enter any student’s home and make critical statements, something that should deeply upset all Americans. . ” precedent comes from another era. In 1969, in the Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court has allowed students to wear black bracelets to protest the war in Vietnam, but disruptive speech, at least on school grounds, could be punished. campus and off was easier in 1969, before the rise of social media. Nowadays, most courts have allowed public schools to discipline students for social media posts, as long as they are linked to school activities and threaten to disrupt them. A divided three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit took a different approach, announcing that the rule seems to limit the ability of public schools to address many kinds of disturbing speech by students on social media, including racist threats and cyberbullying. . In a similar opinion, Judge Thomas L. Ambro wrote that he would rule on a narrower verdict for the student. grounds. That would have been enough, he said, to say that her speech was protected by the First Amendment because it did not interrupt school activities. The majority were wrong, he said, to protect all speech off campus. In a brief appeal to the Supreme Court to hear the school district’s appeal, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association said the line that drew the 3rd lane is too rough. ‘Disruptive or harmful tweet sent from the school cafeteria, or after the student crossed the street during her walk home, had the same impact,’ ‘the letter said. “The formalist rule of the 3rd Circuit makes schools powerless when a hateful message is introduced from outside campus.” The student, represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Supreme Court that the first amendment protected her ‘colorful expression of frustration’. in a short-lived Snapchat on her personal social media, on a weekend, off-campus, which contained no threat or harassment or mention of her school, and which caused or threatened no disruption to her school. ‘The assignment focused on the last point, and it did not take much time to defend the broader approach of the 3rd circle. The Supreme Court has the reputation of protecting protection rights from the first amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts, in an appearance at a law school last year, described himself as “probably the most aggressive defender of the first amendment in court”. But the court has since the Tinker ruling in 1969. And in the court’s last major ruling on students’ freedom of speech, in 2007, Roberts wrote the majority opinion, along with a principal who suspended a student because he was a banner displayed with the words “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” “There is at least one important area where Chief Justice Roberts’ defense of the first amendment is particularly lazy: student speech,” he said. “I sincerely hope that Roberts will regain his preference for the first amendment when the court finally resolves this urgent question.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. (C) 2020 The New York Times Company