We covered this in May when it came to light that Brandi Levy and her High School Administration didn’t see eye to eye. She wanted to move up from the JV to the Varsity Cheerleading team – Admin said no. She decided to let loose with a potty mouth rampage on Snapchat.
The school threw her off the JV team as well. At the time, I posited:
Is this a Free Speech Case or a School Overreach Case? Kind of both. Under the guise of Free Speech, a School Board is about to get their buttocks reddened by a policy that students (your kids) are THEIR kids 24/7/365. And as such, they can “punish them” for anything they do outside of school hours and school grounds.
School Boards and Administrations believe that the legal in loco parentis responsibility they have while kids are in school can be extended to just about everywhere and at any time even when the kids are with their parents. In charge forever seems to be the name of the game.
Well, their buttocks are now truly reddened as the Supreme Court of the United States has rendered the decision that was expected – in favor of Brandi Levy’s Free Speech (reformatted, emphasis mine):
Supreme Court sides with HS cheerleader suspended over profanity-laced Snapchat
The Supreme Court has sided with a high school cheerleader from Pennsylvania who was suspended after posting a profanity-laced message on Snapchat while away from school grounds.
In an 8-1 [Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting -Skip] ruling on Wednesday, the court concluded that the school district violated the student’s First Amendment right to free speech by handing down a punishment after learning of the message. Though the matter itself appears rather inconsequential, the court’s ruling could prove influential in an age where social media has blurred the lines between on-campus and off-campus speech.
…Levy, along with her parents, sued the school district and won a decisive victory at the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the school exceeded its authority by punishing off-campus student speech. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court concurred with the Third Circuit’s decision, though didn’t go so far as to say schools never have authority to regulate off-campus speech.
I think this was decided correctly, though not entirely. Free Speech is free speech and it is protected under the First Amendment but schools do have the ability to regulate speech on campus to prevent severe disruption. I do wish, however, that the Court had established limits on the reach of the school district, not just in the speech area but on a time and location basis as well (other than at a school sanctioned event). If a student is at home, and state something about school, does a School’s reach extend there? How about the case where a school suspended two students simply because parents had brought them to a gun range and put a picture of a student holding a gun up onto social media?
Who works for whom? And this was a excellent example of School overreach.
More and more, schools are creating policies that THEY have the primary role when it comes to childrens’ behaviors and raising them up. In this, they have no problem in nullifying Parental Rights which, in most States, are codified in Law (which I’ll have another post on in the near future).
(H/T: The Blaze)
