Supreme Court will soon decide if schools can punish students for off-campus, online speech
January 2014, Reid Sagehorn, a student at Rogers High School in Minnesota, jokingly tweeted “actually yeah” in response to a question about whether he had made out with one of his high school teachers.
The public school, acting on the tweet, suspended him for seven weeks. Sagehorn, a member of the National Honor Society, fought the suspension in a federal court,claiming the actions of school officials violated his First Amendment right to free speech.
Did the school have the right to punish him for his off-campus expression? It turns out – no.
In August 2015, a federal judge rejected the school officials’ motion to have the case dismissed. After all, the court found that Sagehorn made the post while away from campus, during nonschool hours, without using the school’s computers. And last month Sagehorn collected a settlement of more than US$400,000.
Sadly, Reid Sagehorn’s case is not unique. For at least the past 15 years, schools across the nation have engaged in Orwellian overreaches into the homes and bedrooms of students to punish them for their off-campus, online expression regarding classmates, teachers and administrators.
Despite the bevy of cases, the issue of whether schools can punish students for off-campus, online speech remains unresolved.
Cases where school kids were suspended
For instance, in April 2015, a federal court in Oregon considered a case called Burge v Colton School District 53 in which an eighth grader was suspended from his public middle school based upon out-of-school comments he posted on his personal Facebook page.
And in September 2014, a federal court in New York considered a case called Bradford v Norwich City School District in which a public high school student was suspended “based on a text-message conversation he had with another student regarding a third student while outside of school.”
Judge Glenn Suddaby observed in Bradford that “the Supreme Court has yet to speak Supreme Court will soon decide if schools can punish students for off-campus, online speech:
