B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District

Public school students’ free speech rights have long depended on a vital distinction: We “defer to the school[]” when its “arm of authority does not reach beyond the schoolhouse gate,” but when it reaches beyond that gate, it“must answer to the same constitutional commands that bind all other institutions of government.” Thomasv. Bd. of Educ., 607F.2d 1043, 1044–45 (2d Cir. 1979). The digital revolution, however, has complicated that distinction. With new forms of communication have come new frontiers of regulation, where educators assert the power to regulate online student speech made off school grounds, after school hours, and without school resources.This appeal takes us to one such frontier. Appellee B.L. failed to make her high school’s varsity cheerleading team and, over a weekend and away from school,posted a picture of her-self with the caption “fuck cheer” to Snapchat.J.A. 484.She was suspended from the junior varsity team for a year and sued her school in federal court.The District Court granted summary judgment in B.L.’s favor, ruling that the school had violated her First Amendment rights. We agree and therefore will affirm.



I.BACKGROUND B.L. is a student at Mahanoy Area High School (MAHS. As a rising freshman, she tried out for cheerleading and made 5junior varsity. The next year,she was again placed on JV.To add insult to injury, an incoming freshman made the varsityteam. B.L. was frustrated: She had not advanced in cheerleading, was unhappy with her position on a private softball team,and was anxious about upcoming exams. So one Saturday,while hanging out with a friend at a local store, she decided to vent those frustrations. She took a photo of herself and her friend with their middle fingers raised and posted it to her Snapchat story.1Thesnap was visible to about250 “friends,” many of whom wereMAHS students and some of whom were cheer-leaders, and it was accompanied by apuerilecaption:“Fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything.” J.A.484. To that post, B.L.added a second: “Love how me and [another student] get told we need a year of jv before we make varsity but that’s [sic] doesn’t matter to anyone else? .”2J.A.485.One of B.L.’s teammates took a screenshot of her first snap and sent it to one of MAHS’s two cheerleading coaches. That coach brought the screenshot to the attention of her co-coach, 1“Snapchat is a social media application for smartphones that allows users to send private text, photo, and video mes-sages to other users.” J.A. 6. Snaps can be viewedonly tem-porarily and “cannot be accessed from the web.” Id.2The “upside-down smiley face” emoji “indicate[s] silliness, sarcasm, irony, passive aggression, or frustrated resignation.”Upside-Down Face Emoji, Dictionary.com, https://www.dic-tionary.com/e/emoji/upside-down-face-emoji(last visited June25, 2020).

We therefore hold that B.L.’s snap was not coveredby any of the rules on which the School District relies and reject its contention that B.L. waived her First Amendment rights.