When a high school freshman—disappointed that she hadn’t made her varsity cheerleading team—flipped off her school and dropped f-bombs on Snapchat, she couldn’t have known that the future of American First Amendment law hung in the balance of her middle finger.
The girl, known in pleadings as “B.L.,” was shopping with friends on a Saturday afternoon in 2017. She posted a selfie in her Snapchat story that included her best friend. The picture showed both girls extending the bird, with the caption “Fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything.” A second post said, “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?”
Among B.L.’s 250 online friends, a tattle-tale teammate placed a screenshot of the profane posts in a coach’s hands. The school in Pennsylvania threw B.L. off the junior varsity cheerleading team on the grounds that her post violated team and school rules, which the student acknowledged before joining the team. Those rules required that athletes “have respect for [their] school, coaches, . . . [and] other cheerleaders”; avoid “foul language and inappropriate gestures”; and refrain from sharing “negative information regarding cheerleading, cheerleaders, or coaches . . . on the internet.”
B.L.’s parents appealed the decision, but the athletic director, school principal, district superintendent, and school board all sided with the Mahanoy Area School District. Their next step was to file a First Amendment lawsuit, which they won at both the district and circuit court levels.
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