Pennsylvania Court Reverses Student's Expulsion Over A Snapchat Post, Reminds School …

from the disrupting-school-disruption dept Do you want cheer fucked? Because this is how you get cheer fucked. No less than the highest court in the land said the off-campus speech of students is subject to the First Amendment, not the whims of school administrators who feel ways about online stuff. A cheerleader expressing her displeasure with school related activities posted a litany of f-bomb-laden complaints to Instagram, resulting in her being summarily dismissed from the cheer team. The Supreme Court said “fuck cheer” is protected speech, no matter how school administrators felt about it. Students’ constitutional rights don’t disappear just because they’re students. This point has been driven home several times by courts, most famously by the Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker decision, which stated: It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. And yet schools continue to argue otherwise. But these arguments are unavailing, as this recent Pennsylvania state court decision [PDF] points out. Penncrest High School expelled G.S. (a minor referred to only by their initials) for posting a band’s lyrics to Snapchat. Despite the fact G.S. did this off-campus during non-school hours,…
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