As I predicted, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled in favor of a former Mahanoy Area School District cheerleader who was kicked off the cheer team for an intemperate Snapchat posting that was sent away from school on her own time.

The high court ruled 8-1, saying that the punishment was over the top. Still, the court did not completely protect all off-campus speech. Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter.

Writing for the majority, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said that “sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary.”

Let me try to translate what Breyer meant. While the student’s posting to her friends might have been in the extreme for what is expected of civil speech from a student, she had the right to share her feelings in this manner.

For those of you unfamiliar with the case, let me give you a brief summary:

Cheerleader Brandi Levy, a high school freshman in 2017, was so frustrated with her coach’s decision to relegate her to the JV squad for another season, that on a Saturday while at Cocoa Hut, a 24-hour convenience store in Mahanoy City, she posted a Snapchat message and photo of her and a friend with upraised middle fingers that used the “f” word with “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything.”

The message went to about 250 of her online “friends,” and, consistent with Snapchat policy, it was scheduled to disappear after 24 hours, before school resumed on Monday.

Although it was just another example of a student letting off steam, someone sent a screenshot of the message to the cheerleading coach, which led to Levy’s being kicked off the team. The resulting protracted legal battle has cost the struggling school district tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and has made it the laughingstock of the nation for its overreaction.

The coaches maintained that Levy’s snap violated the team rules she had agreed to, including showing respect, avoiding “foul language and inappropriate gestures,” and a strict policy against posting “any negative information regarding cheerleading, cheerleaders, or coaches placed on the internet.”

In a ruling against the district in an appeals court, the judge said that despite the authorization, a student cannot sign away her First Amendment rights.

Additionally, after Levy’s parents, Larry and Betty Lou, had appealed without success to the athletic director, the principal, the superintendent and the school board, they filed a federal lawsuit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union.

This was a high-stakes case, because it could determine how the First Amendment’s protection of free speech applies to off-campus activities for the nation’s 50 million school students.

Following the decision, Levy said: “Young people need to have the ability to express themselves without worrying about being punished when they get to school. I never could have imagined that one simple snap would turn into a Supreme Court case, but I’m proud that my family and I advocated for the rights of millions of public school students.”

Justice Breyer, however, said the Supreme Court’s decision did not give all student off-campus speech free rein. “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,” Breyer wrote, adding “the school’s interest in teaching good manners is not sufficient, in this case, to overcome B.L.’s interest in free expression.”

Yale Law Professor Justin Driver called the Mahanoy Area case “the most momentous case in more than five decades involving student speech.” He predicts that it will give badly needed guidance and clarity to lower courts when it comes to the issue of off-campus social media commentary by students, an area that is still murky because of its recentness.

The school district appealed two lower court rulings, arguing that the First Amendment does not “force schools to ignore student speech that upends the campus environment simply because that speech originated off campus. Wherever student speech originates, schools should be able to treat students alike when their speech is directed at the school and imposes the same disruptive harms on the school environment.”

David Cole, legal director of the ACLU, was ecstatic with the ruling. “Protecting young people’s free speech rights when they are outside of school is vital, and this is a huge victory for the free speech rights of millions of students who attend our nation’s public schools,” he said.

“The school in this case asked the court to allow it to punish speech that it considered ‘disruptive,’ regardless of where it occurs. If the court had accepted that argument, it would have put in peril all manner of young people’s speech, including their expression on politics, school operations and general teen frustrations. The message from this ruling is clear - free speech is for everyone, and that includes public school students.”

If the district had taken my free advice and settled with the Levys by letting Brandi back on the team, it would have saved tens of thousands of dollars of its taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

The Mahanoy Area district includes about 1,000 students from the boroughs of Mahanoy City and Gilberton and Mahanoy, Delano and Ryan townships.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.