Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., the case can finally live up to the hype.
âThe Court made clear that schoolsâ power to limit campus speech is not unlimited,â says Jeff Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonprofit. âSchools canât act like parents when disciplining off-campus speech. Students do have important First Amendment interests.â
Jen Reidel, a high school civics teacher in Washington state, had been following the case closely since last fall. She teaches a law and society class to students in Bellingham, and with her school still doing remote learning, she felt she had to find an especially interesting case to capture studentsâ attention through the screen. Just any Supreme Court case wouldnât be enough to reach through those âblack tilesâ on Zoom and engage her students.
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(The Center Square) â The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of free speech rights for students outside of the classroom in a decision Wednesday.
The court sided with former Mahanoy Area High School student and cheerleader Brandi Levy in the case, formally known as
Mahanoy Area School District v B.L., with a 8-1 decision in her favor. Mahanoy Area High School is located in Pennsylvania.
Levy, upset that she had not made her schoolâs varsity cheer team, posted on the social media site Snapchat a simple message with explicit language expressing her frustration.
The message was captured by a classmate and was eventually presented to school officials, who decided to suspend Levy from the junior varsity cheer team for a year.
Cheerleader prevails at U S Supreme Court in free speech case kbyr.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kbyr.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
On Wednesday, June 23, 2021, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in
Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., a much-anticipated decision regarding schools’ regulation of off-campus speech. The Court held that while schools may discipline students for some off-campus speech, their ability to do so is much more limited than for on-campus speech.
B.L. was a student at Mahanoy Area High School and cheered on the junior varsity team during her freshman year. When she did not make the varsity squad her sophomore year, B.L. posted a photo to Snapchat of her and a friend holding up their middle fingers and captioned the photo with multiple uncensored expletives. She posted a second message referring to cheerleading but not including profanity. Some of B.L.’s Snapchat friends shared the posts with the cheerleading coaches, who determined that B.L. violated team rules as well as school rules. B.L. was removed from the cheerleading team f