Cursing cheerleader wins free speech fight

The US Supreme Court has backed a teenager suspended from a cheerleading squad after a profanity-laden tirade on social media.

Brandi Levy in her former cheerleading outfit outside Mahanoy Area High School.

The US Supreme Court has backed a teenager who claimed her suspension from a cheerleading squad after a profanity-laden tirade on social media violated her right to free speech.

In 2017 Brandi Levy, then 14 and a member of the junior cheerleading team at Mahanoy Area High School, Pennsylvania, failed to qualify for the senior squad.

Her reaction was typical of many teenagers. “F..k school, f..k softball, f..k cheer, f..k everything,” she posted on the messaging service Snapchat, alongside a photograph of herself displaying a middle finger.

Snapchat messages disappear after 24 hours, but somebody took a photograph. Two days later Ms Levy was summoned into the coach’s office, given a dressing down and banned from all cheerleading for a year.

On Wednesday (Thursday AEST) the court ruled by a majority of eight to one that her first amendment rights under the US constitution had been violated by school staff.

“It might be tempting to dismiss BL’s words as unworthy of the robust first amendment protections discussed herein,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote. “But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary.”

Central to the case was whether the school had the right to regulate what pupils say when they are away from the campus.

Ms Levy, now 18 and studying accounting, had posted her Snapchat message on a Saturday while in a shop.

The first amendment does not “force schools to ignore student speech that upends the campus environment simply because that speech originated off campus”, a legal filing by Mahanoy Area School District, said in support of Ms Levy’s ban.

“Wherever student speech originates, schools should be able to treat students alike when their speech is directed at the school and imposes the same disruptive harms on the school environment.”

The ruling fell short of saying that schools never have the right to discipline pupils for what they say off campus, but said that in Ms Levy’s case the school had gone too far. Justice Breyer added: “The school’s interest in teaching good manners is not sufficient, in this case, to overcome BL’s interest in free expression.”

THE TIMES