NY Times–
It was a Saturday in the spring of 2017, and a ninth-grade student in Pennsylvania was having a bad day. She had just learned that she had failed to make the varsity cheerleading squad and would remain on junior varsity.
The student expressed her frustration on social media, sending a message on Snapchat to about 250 friends. The message included an image of the student and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with text expressing a similar sentiment. Using a curse word four times, the student expressed her dissatisfaction with “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything.”
Though Snapchat messages are ephemeral by design, another student took a screenshot of this one and showed it to her mother, a coach. The school suspended the student from cheerleading for a year, saying the punishment was needed to “avoid chaos” and maintain a “teamlike environment.”
The student sued the school district, winning a sweeping victory in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia. The court said the First Amendment did not allow public schools to punish students for speech outside school grounds.
Next month, at its first private conference after the holiday break, the Supreme Court will consider whether to hear the case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., No. 20-255.
https://brobible.com/culture/article...supreme-court/
When and to what extent school authorities may control and punish a student's off-campus speech and actions is an interesting study. Obviously there are instances where it makes sense, as where it involves threats of violence, but it very often goes well beyond that sort of thing. On the other hand, is participating in an extracurricular activity like cheerleading a "right" that must be respected by the school even if the student publicly expresses contempt for the activity itself? All things considered this is not the case I'd want to see go to the high court - primarily because there have been other cases where the school authorities' behavior was far more egregious and questionable.