When 14-year-old Brandi Levy didn’t make the varsity cut as a freshman cheerleader for the Mahanoy Golden Bears, she sounded off on social media, as teenagers are known to do.
“I was frustrated. I was upset. I was angry. And I made a post on Snapchat,” Levy told ABC News Live. “I said, ‘F school, F cheer, F softball, F everything.'”
When she posted the vulgar message to her friends on a weekend in 2017, she never thought she’d hear about it again. But days later, the school accused her of breaching a code of conduct and suspended her from cheerleading for an entire year.
Levy’s Snapchat post and the punishment that followed are now at the center of a major U.S. Supreme Court case that tests the boundaries of school discipline and the rights of students to free speech.
Two lower federal courts sided with Levy in the dispute, ordering her returned to the team in 2017 and allowed her to continue her cheerleading career. Later, in a sweeping decision, a federal appeals court affirmed the decision, saying a school’s authority to enforce the rules “does not apply off-campus.”
“If they would have just taken her aside and said, ‘Watch; be careful.’ But the action they took, I think reached above and beyond where they should be,” said Larry Levy, Brandi’s father, who sued the school with help from ACLU.
Healy said schools must be able to discipline students for inappropriate conduct online if they would clearly be disciplined for the same conduct offline.
Levy maintains her Snapchat did not violate a school cheerleading code that required “respect” and “no negative information” to be expressed while part of the team.
School officials disagree.
“That type of language and that type of rhetoric causes the school harm and can cause a disruption in the school,” Healy said. “Social media takes it to another step, right? There’s a wider audience.”
State and national associations of school superintendents, school boards, teachers and principals have all filed legal briefs supporting Mahanoy Area School District in the case, warning that a decision restricting off-campus discipline would hurt efforts to ensure safety and order and to combat teenage cyberbullying.
Roughly one in three American middle or high school students say they’ve been victims of online harassment, according to the Cyberbullying Research Center. The group has found that the threat of punishment by schools is a key deterrent to would-be bullies.
“If they perceived that they would get in trouble at school for cyberbullying, they were significantly less likely to do it,” said Justin Patchin, co-director of the center and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. “If the courts come down and say, look, if it happens away from school, there’s nothing you can do about it, I think that’s going to potentially open up a lot of concern.”