Published on: Wednesday, June 23, 2021

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., that a Pennsylvania school district violated a cheerleader’s First Amendment rights when it suspended her from the squad for F-word Snapchat posts. Justice Clarence Thomas was the sole dissent.

The cheerleader, identified as “B.L.,” used the F-word after failing to make the varsity squad, meaning that she would remain on the junior varsity squad. The post had pictured the cheerleader and a friend holding up their middle fingers with the text, “f- - - school f- - - softball f- - - cheer f- - - everything.” The cheerleader, a freshman student at Mahanoy Area High School, a public school in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, wrote the post outside school hours and off campus. The post nonetheless made its way to the school’s cheerleading coaches, who suspended her from the team for her entire sophomore year, saying she had violated team rules.

Public schools may have a special interest in regulating some off-campus speech, but the special interests offered by the Mahanoy Area High School weren’t sufficient to overcome the cheerleader’s interest in free expression, the court said.

“The vulgarity in B.L.’s posts encompassed a message, an expression of B.L.’s irritation with, and criticism of, the school and cheerleading communities,” the court wrote. “It might be tempting to dismiss B.L.’s words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections. … But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary.”