Snap, Crackle, Prohibited: What’s Acceptable Off-Campus Student Speech?
By Ed Madison and Hans Boyle
On one fateful Saturday night in 2017, a high school sophomore, aggrieved at not landing a spot on the varsity cheerleading squad, posted a photo of herself and a friend flipping the bird on Snapchat.
The text superimposed over the photo simply read, “f**k school f**k softball f**k cheer f**k everything.”
Believe it or not, this text, plus the less than tasteful gesture, is now at the center of an ongoing legal battle headed for the U.S. Supreme Court (and not because of the grammatical errors).
It all began after a student shared the Snap with cheerleading coaches at Mahanoy Area High School, who promptly benched the sophomore for the season (she had initially made the lowly junior varsity squad). They asserted her language on social media violated team rules.
With the Pennsylvania ACLU’s help, the student (identified as B.L. in legal documents) sued the district for violating her First Amendment rights and prevailed in a federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case as soon as April, with the Biden Administration, along with other school administrator-aligned groups, supporting the district.
The central question before the court: can students face punishment from school officials for speech posted online and off-campus?
Their ultimate decision could prove consequential for a generation of students who’ve grown up in the digital era. However, this wouldn’t be the first time the Supreme Court took a significant swing at students’ speech rights.
Almost forty years ago, student journalists at Hazelwood East High School in Missouri sued their school district after their principal ordered two articles — one concerning divorce, the other teen pregnancy — scrapped from the student newspaper.
In a landmark 1983 decision, the Court sided with the district. It ruled schools could set specific standards for student speech on school property, and schools indeed had the right to suppress speech inconsistent with “the shared values of a civilized social order.”
The case gave schools more leeway to curb speech than previously granted in the 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines case, where parents sued school officials after they sent students home for wearing black armbands protesting the Vietnam War. In that case, the Court decided students didn’t simply lose their free speech protections upon entering the classroom.
To justify such a move, school officials had to prove a student’s conduct would “materially and substantially interfere” with learning, the court asserted in 1969. But with the Hazelwood decision, the court recognized a new class of school-sponsored speech, which gave administrators much more latitude to censor student journalists.
According to the former executive director of the Student Press Law Center Frank LoMonte, the Hazelwood decision had a far-reaching chilling effect on student speech.
In 2009, for example, school officials at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, halted the publication of an edition of The Statesman, the school’s award-winning student newspaper, because of stories detailing students drinking, shoplifting, and (once again) teen pregnancy.
In 2019, administrators at Central Naperville High School in Naperville, Illinois, censored a quarter of a student article highlighting the need for more special education staff.
While Illinois is one of 14 states with laws protecting student press freedom to counteract against the Hazelwood ruling, seven of those states (not including Illinois) lack language protecting faculty advisors from retaliation over a student publication.
All of this, according to LoMonte, has meant more and more high school and college students have gone through their education reluctant to challenge censorship and ask tough questions.
Victoria Smith Ekstrand, professor at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism agrees, arguing Hazelwood, along with an education system too focused on standardized testing, has made students wary of debate and exploring complex topics.
Now more than ever, we need students who can think critically. While many school administrators may desire to control speech, the fact remains that students can and do freely and frequently publish their viewpoints via multiple platforms. In successful journalism-oriented classes like the Journalistic Learning Initative’s (JLI) Effective Communicators course, students learn to express their opinions responsibly and to consider possible consequences if they do not. They work collaboratively on meaningful projects, find their voice through publication, and develop their own evidenced-based point of view, along with a skeptical eye. Most importantly of all, students become more self-directed in their learning.
Previous lawmakers never contemplated the ease with which anyone with a smartphone and internet access can now publish. The key question is whether students should be entitled to the same First Amendment protections enjoyed by adults?
Many administrations compellingly argue they should be able to prohibit speech that causes a “substantial disruption of school activities or an invasion of the rights of others,” as stated in the Hazelwood decision. In this instance, whether it occurs on or off campus.
We’re not suggesting the Snap authored by the aspiring varsity cheerleader was speech that advanced meaningful discourse. But if the social media comments she made about her high school — posted while outside of school and during the weekend — can fall under the district’s scrutiny, what does that mean for student journalists who often connect with sources through Facebook and post stories on Twitter?
Hopefully, the Supreme Court will arrive at a decision that doesn’t further restrict students’ speech and also dampen their drive to learn.
