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Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L, which the Supreme Court heard on Wednesday, is a tough case. And it’s not tough because it presents the kind of politically toxic questions that often cause the justices to retreat into their partisan corners.
Members of the Court from across the political spectrum spent Wednesday morning struggling to determine when a school district should be allowed to discipline students for speech that they engage in when they are not at school or engaged in any kind of school-sponsored activity. The question has become all the more difficult now that the internet allows a student to post content over the weekend to social media that can be read by all of their classmates on Monday.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
ACLU via AP
Brandi Levy wears her former cheerleading outfit while standing outside Mahanoy Area High School in Mahanoy City.
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PHILADELPHIA When Brandi Levy learned she’d been relegated to Mahanoy Area High School’s junior varsity cheerleading team in 2017 she did what most teens these days do turned to social media to vent her frustration.
But her profane post on Snapchat in which the then-14-year-old, middle finger extended, wrote “F - school, F - softball, F - cheer, F - everything” didn’t just get her suspended from the squad for a year. It landed the Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, teen in the middle of what legal scholars have described as the most significant case involving the free speech rights of students to land before the U.S. Supreme Court in 50 years.
“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” wrote Justice William Brennan in 1989. Wahever the political differences or kinship you may have with the late Supreme Court justice, on this point many of our fellow Americans would agree.