School boards and school administrators apparently have not gotten the message about students’ free speech rights from two 2011 cases in Pennsylvania.

We’re knee-deep in another free speech case, this one from the Mahanoy Area School District in Schuylkill County where a frustrated junior varsity cheerleader, after failing to make the varsity squad, unleashed a string of obscenities against the school, cheerleading and just about everything else in a Snapchat post nearly two years ago.

The post caused an uproar at the high school and led to the student’s dismissal from the cheerleading squad. This resulted in the girl’s father filing a lawsuit against the district, because his daughter’s posted comments were made off-campus on a weekend and did not involve school property.

The American Civil Liberties Union intervened in the Schuylkill case on behalf of the girl, who was identified in court papers only as “B.L.” since she was a minor at the time of the filing of the suit.

“Public schools need to stick to educating students and stay out of the business of disciplining them during their off hours,” said Reggie Shuford, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

A federal court judge hearing the case agreed and ruled that the district violated the student’s free speech rights when it removed her from the cheerleading squad.

The school district this month filed a notice that it is appealing the ruling by Judge Richard Caputo, citing among other things that the student and her parents signed an authorization before she tried out for the squad agreeing to abide by the “Cheerleading Rules,” which require squad members “to have respect for the school, coaches, teachers, other cheerleaders and teams.”

The rules prohibit foul language and inappropriate gestures. “There will be no toleration of any negative information regarding cheerleading, cheerleaders or coaches placed on the internet,” the written rules say.

The judge said that despite signing the authorization, a student cannot sign away his or her First Amendment rights.

When coaches Nicole Luchetta-Rump (a math teacher at the high school) and April Gnall (a third-grade teacher) became aware of the post, they initiated action which led to the girl’s suspension from the squad.

According to the facts in the case, agreed to by both sides, B.L., posing in street clothes with a friend, middle finger raised, took a selfie at a teen hangout in Mahanoy City. On top of the photo, B.L. added the following text: “(Expletive) school, (expletive) softball, (expletive) cheer, (expletive) everything.” She then posted the captioned photo on her private Snapchat account on a weekend where it could have been viewed briefly by about 250 of her friends.

“The law is crystal clear here,” said ACLU counsel Molly Tack-Hooper. “School districts have no power to punish students for swearing outside of school.”

Tack-Hooper said that she, the girl and her parents made “many attempts” to resolve the case without litigation.

“It is a shame that the school district has decided to waste more taxpayer dollars fighting a battle that’s already been resolved — rightly — in favor of students’ free speech.”

In 2011, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in two cases brought by the ACLU of Pennsylvania that schools could not discipline students for social media posts created off-campus when the posts do not substantially disrupt school activities.

“If B.L. could be kicked off the cheerleading team for blowing off steam in a private social media post, then that would mean that schools have the power to control what students say on their own time. That’s a very scary prospect,” Tack-Hooper said. “Luckily, the First Amendment doesn’t allow that.”

“As Judge Caputo observed,” she added, “students have the right to speak freely on their own time. And that’s no less true for cheerleaders.”

Caputo cited two famous Supreme Court student free speech cases — Tinker v. Des Moines and Hazlewood School District v. Kuhlmeier. “I agree with B.L. in that the school district’s argument puts the constitutional cart before the horse,” Caputo wrote.

“The district’s concession that B.L.’s speech occurred off-campus is all but fatal. Coaches cannot punish students for what they say off the field if that speech fails to satisfy the Tinker or Kuhlmeier standards.”

The school district is made up of about 1,000 students from the boroughs of Mahanoy City and Gilberton and Mahanoy, Delano and Ryan townships.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com