Schools, he said, can address, for instance, “substantial disruption of learning-related activities or the protection of those who make up a school community.” “We do not now set forth a broad, highly general First Amendment rule stating just what counts as ‘off campus’ speech and whether or how ordinary First Amendment standards must give way,” he wrote. Those issues required a more cautious approach than the one adopted by the appeals court, Justice Breyer wrote. “These include,” he wrote, “serious or severe bullying or harassment targeting particular individuals threats aimed at teachers or other students the failure to follow rules concerning lessons, the writing of papers, the use of computers, or participation in other online school activities and breaches of school security devices, including material maintained within school computers.” The school’s regulatory interests remain significant in some off-campus circumstances.” “Unlike the Third Circuit,” he wrote, “we do not believe the special characteristics that give schools additional license to regulate student speech always disappear when a school regulates speech that takes place off campus. Justice Breyer wrote that the appeals court had gone too far. The majority announced a categorical rule banning discipline for off-campus speech that seemed to limit the ability of public schools to address many kinds of disturbing communications by students on social media, including racist threats and cyberbullying. Levy, the judges disagreed about the rationale. Though the Third Circuit was united in ruling for Ms. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court allowed students to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, saying the students had not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” But disruptive speech, at least on school grounds, could be punished, the court added. Levy from junior varsity cheerleading for a year, saying the punishment was needed to “avoid chaos” and maintain a “teamlike environment.” Though Snapchat messages are meant to vanish not long after they are sent, another student took a screenshot and showed it to her mother, a coach. Levy objected to “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything.” Levy and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with a string of words expressing the same sentiment. She sent the message on a Saturday from the Cocoa Hut, a convenience store popular with teenagers. The case concerned Brandi Levy, a Pennsylvania high school student who had expressed her dismay over not making the varsity cheerleading squad by sending a colorful Snapchat message to about 250 people. “The opinion reaffirms that schools’ authority over the lives of students is not boundless,” said Justin Driver, a law professor at Yale and the author of “The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court and the Battle for the American Mind.”īut he added that the nuanced ruling, which raised as many questions as it answered, “offers little in the way of clarity to students, educators or lower-court judges.” In its ruling, the court appeared to acknowledge that it needed to set some boundaries on the power of school systems to decide what was appropriate in the current era. The ruling came at a time when social media has complicated issues of free speech for students, giving wide circulation to opinions, comments, gossip and other utterances that might otherwise attract little notice. “Schools have a strong interest in ensuring that future generations understand the workings in practice of the well-known aphorism, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’” he wrote. “Our representative democracy only works if we protect the ‘marketplace of ideas.’” “America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy,” he wrote. Breyer, writing for the majority, said part of what schools must teach students is the value of free speech.
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