Avery Doninger, center; her attorney Jon Schoenhorn, left and her mother, Lauren Doninger, talk to reporters outside Schoenhorn's office in Hartford, Conn., Monday, July 16, 2007, during a news conference.
There's an important lesson to be learned from a young woman's legal wrangling for the right to call her school administrators "douchebags": Don't mess with Jamfest. You hear me, man? Don't. Mess. With Jamfest.
Avery Doninger's legal odyssey began in 2007. Back then, she was a high-school junior. (She's now 20 and in college.) She and her friends had organized a battle-of-the-bands competition called, you know it, "Jamfest."
But the fest couldn't be as jammin' as Doninger and her fellow organizers hoped, because they were told by school administrators they could not use the new auditorium on the day of the event. The principal and superintendent both told "Jamfest" organizers that the battle-of-the-bands could be held in the cafeteria or rescheduled when the auditorium was available, reports the New York Daily News.
And that's when Doninger lost it, man. Rather than working with school administrators, she took to the Internet to let students know the totally depressing news and who was to blame for it, like, totally.
"Jamfest is cancelled due to the douchebags in central office," she wrote in a blog post.
As a result, administrators removed Doninger's name from an election for senior class secretary. She subsequently sued, claiming the action violated her First Amendment rights, but a federal appeals court on Monday ruled that excluding Doninger from the election because of her use of the "Dbag" word did not violate her right to free speech.
"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," the court said in its decision. "Doninger was not free to engage in such behaviour while serving as a class representative - a representative charged with working with these very same officials to carry out her responsibilities," the decision went on to say.
The court also ruled that the school had the right to exclude Doninger from the election because she had agreed to the school's code of conduct, which does not condone, it's safe to conclude, going around calling school staff "douchebags."
The federal appeals court decision upholds a lower court decision to dismiss Doninger's case.
According to the New York Daily News, Doninger's attorney is vowing to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
I can just see the name of the suit now, Doninger v. The Douchebags Who Cancelled Jamfest.
As for Jamfest, it was eventually rescheduled.
Dave McGinn