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MAHANOY AREA SCHOOL DIST. v. B. L. 

Opinion of the Court 

school’s varsity cheerleading squad and for right fielder on 
a private softball team.  She did not make the varsity cheer-
leading team or get her preferred softball position, but she 
was offered a spot on the cheerleading squad’s junior var-
sity  team.    B. L.  did  not  accept  the  coach’s  decision  with
good  grace,  particularly  because  the  squad  coaches  had 
placed an entering freshman on the varsity team. 

That weekend, B. L. and a friend visited the Cocoa Hut, 
a local convenience store.  There, B. L. used her smartphone 
to post two photos on Snapchat, a social media application
that allows users to post photos and videos that disappear 
after  a  set period  of  time.    B. L. posted  the  images  to  her
Snapchat  “story,”  a  feature  of  the  application  that  allows
any person in the user’s “friend” group (B. L. had about 250 
“friends”) to view the images for a 24 hour period. 

The  first  image  B. L.  posted  showed  B.  L.  and  a  friend 
with middle fingers raised; it bore the caption: “Fuck school
fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything.”  App. 20.  The sec-
ond image was blank but for a caption, which read: “Love
how me and [another student] get told we need a year of jv 
before we make varsity but tha[t] doesn’t matter to anyone 
else?”  The caption also contained an upside-down smiley-
face emoji.  Id., at 21. 

B. L.’s Snapchat “friends” included other Mahanoy Area
High School students, some of whom also belonged to the 
cheerleading squad.  At least one of them, using a separate
cellphone,  took  pictures  of  B.  L.’s  posts  and  shared  them 
with other members of the cheerleading squad.  One of the 
students  who  received  these  photos  showed  them  to  her 
mother (who was a cheerleading squad coach), and the im-
ages  spread.  That  week,  several  cheerleaders  and  other 
students approached the cheerleading coaches “visibly up-
set” about B. L.’s posts.  Id., at 83–84.  Questions about the 
posts persisted during an Algebra class taught by one of the
two coaches.  Id., at 83. 

After discussing the matter with the school principal, the