Can schools punish students for off-campus, online speech?
Published in
1 min readJan 12, 2016
This article by Clay Calvert originally appeared on The Conversation on Jan. 12, 2016.
In January 2014, Reid Sagehorn, a student at Rogers High School in Minnesota, jokingly tweeted “actually yeah” in response to a question about whether he had made out with one of his high school teachers.
The public school, acting on the tweet, suspended him for seven weeks. Sagehorn, a member of the National Honor Society, fought the suspension in a federal court, claiming the actions of school officials violated his First Amendment right to free speech.
Did the school have the right to punish him for his off-campus expression? It turns out — no.
