On Saturday I heard a report on WFAN, a sports-talk station here in New York City, that a student at a public high school somewhere in the land was suspended recently after tweeting about his lack of playing time on the boys’ basketball team.
Or was he benched? Did I even hear the report? I haven’t been able to find the story.
Of course, educators want to teach kids how to voice concerns in a constructive way. But suspending a student for carping about playing time would be outrageous.
Still, the report, if true, raises the issue of student liberties in an age of social media. Suppose a student were to sue his school for suspending him after taking to Twitter to complain about playing time. Might he have a case?
The answer, I think, would be yes.
In 1969, the Supreme Court held that students have a First Amendment right to engage in political protest. The case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, barred a school from punishing students who showed up at school in black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.
However, for other types of speech, the Supreme Court has tended to balance the civil liberties of students and teachers with the need for school officials to lay down rules of conduct. For example, in 1988, the Supreme Court held that the principal of a Missouri high school could prevent the publication in a newspaper written and edited by a journalism class of articles about teen pregnancy and the effects of divorce on children in a school.
Writing for the majority, Justice White distinguished between the silencing of student speech in a public forum and regulation of student speech that ties to the curriculum:
“The latter question concerns educators’ authority over school-sponsored publications, theatrical productions, and other expressive activities that students, parents, and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school. These activities may fairly be characterized as part of the school curriculum, whether or not they occur in a traditional classroom setting, so long as they are supervised by faculty members and designed to impart particular knowledge or skills to student participants and audiences.
Educators are entitled to exercise greater control over this second form of student expression to assure that participants learn whatever lessons the activity is designed to teach, that readers or listeners are not exposed to material that may be inappropriate for their level of maturity, and that the views of the individual speaker are not erroneously attributed to the school.”
That means school officials generally can censor speech in academic programs so long as the regulation does not favor any particular point of view and that the officials show a reasonable educational justification.
In April, a high school in Lakeland, Florida denied a request by an editor of the student magazine – who herself had endured chemotherapy – to write an article about a proposed constitutional amendment that would permit the use of medical marijuana.
“The fact that some members of the audience might disapprove of, or take offense to, a particular story is not an educationally reasonable basis for censorship,” Frank Lomonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, told the Lakeland Ledger. “Students can, and occasionally do, take their schools to court under the First Amendment and win if they are censored, and a situation like this one could certainly be a candidate.”
The courts have allowed a school to remove an editor who disregarded the school’s policy prohibiting all discussion of drugs in the student newspaper, and to suspend a student who make a sexually explicit speech at a school assembly after being advised by teachers that the remarks would be inappropriate.
That brings me back to the news report about the hoopster. Athletic programs tie to a school’s academic mission, but no one who reads a tweet from a student’s account would reasonably think the message carries the imprimatur of the school.
In that event, the action in the hoopster’s case could shift from the basketball court to a federal court.