Supreme Court grapples with students' First Amendment rights in case involving high school cheerleader
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Updated: 11:51 AM PDT Apr 29, 2021
By Ariane de Vogue, CNN Supreme Court Reporter
Supreme Court grapples with students' First Amendment rights in case involving high school cheerleader
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Updated: 11:51 AM PDT Apr 29, 2021
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I mean, now looking at it, I Don't really have like to say like I was a 14 year old kid, I was upset, I was angry. Every 14 year old kid speaks like that. At one point she had a friend on a Saturday, went to a convenience store and posted a snap Snapchat picture. And several days later she was told by her cheerleading coach that she's been kicked off the team because of her post. So as the law has evolved over the last 50 years, the line that the Supreme Court has drawn is not at the sort of physical boundary of the school, but it's essentially where the school has um supervisory authority or where they are sponsoring an event, certainly in a classroom. So if you're on a zoom class, you can do that. But otherwise the student has full free speech rights, subject to their parents control. And one of the interesting things here is that a number of the justices either have school aged Children or recently had school age Children. So you can say that they have some skin in the game here. Um, and you know, the speech that's potentially going to be censored by the schools covers the political, ideological religious spectrum. Like 95 of kids spend much of their lives online. Is not a reason to censor it. It's a reason to provide even more protection for most kids. That's their primary way of communicating. The solution is not to change the constitutional standard, but to allow schools to develop rules that are targeted at these problems of threats and bullying so that you're not jeopardizing political religious speech and just kids like Brandy who are having a bad day and are spouting off but are not harassing, threatening anybody. Young students and adults like me shouldn't be punished for them expressing their own feelings and letting others know how they feel.