In 2007, Burlington, CT high school student Avery Doninger was a 16-year-old with a blog and big ambitions to serve as class secretary during her senior year. But when principal Karissa Niehoff canceled the school's popular battle-of-the-bands concert called "Jamfest," Doninger excoriated Niehoff on her blog, calling her a "douchebag" and urging students to bombard her with emails. And in one click of a mouse, her political aspirations were ruined—as payback, Niehoff refused to let Doninger serve as class secretary, a position Doninger won as a write-in candidate after Niehoff tossed her off the ballot. Now, over three years later, an appeals court has upheld the school's actions, to the delight of every d-bag administrator in America.
"To be clear, we do not conclude in any way that school administrators are immune from First Amendment scrutiny when they react to student speech by limiting students' participation in extracurricular activities," Judge Debra Ann Livingston wrote in a ruling for the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. "Here, however... it was objectively reasonable for school officials to conclude that Doninger's behavior was potentially disruptive of student government functions (such as the organization of Jamfest) and that Doninger was not free to engage in such behavior while serving as a class representative—a representative charged with working with these very same officials to carry out her responsibilities."
The 2nd circuit also sided with the school's decision not to let Doninger wear a T-shirt reading "Team Avery" to an assembly. Doninger, now 20 and enrolled at a Connecticut college, could not be reached for comment, but her lawyer says this thing isn't over yet, and he tells the Post he wants to take her case all the way to the the Supreme Court: "As cases are circulating around the country and these issues are arising, I think it's important for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the extent to which school systems can censor and restrict student speech that happens off-campus and on the Internet." We can't wait to hear what that douchebag Scalia has to say about all this!
