Colorado public schools are expelling teenagers for social media posts made outside school hours and off school grounds — extending government authority past the classroom door and straight into your living room through your child's phone.
The Founders didn't write the First Amendment with a "nexus" loophole, but that's exactly what Colorado school districts are using to punish students for private speech. A vaguely defined connection between off-campus posts and campus disruption now lets administrators police what your kids say on their own time — and the state doesn't even track how often it happens.
Criminal defense attorney Jamie Hubbard found this out defending a 16-year-old expelled from Cherry Creek Schools over an antisemitic Snapchat post made while out with friends one night in 2019. Despite the app's disappearing messages, the post reached administrators within days. "Kids have a right to go to public school and they have a right to hold opinions about things that their classmate might not like," Hubbard told jurors. "You can't allow schools to suspend and expel someone who holds an opinion that might offend their classmate. The First Amendment doesn't allow for that."
The San Diego Union-Tribune identified more than half a dozen Colorado teenagers suspended or expelled over social media posts in the past seven years. Colorado law lets districts discipline off-campus behavior if there's a "nexus" to campus — a term so loosely defined that both district leaders and student advocates call it a judgment call. Bret Heller, superintendent of the Thompson School District in Loveland, admitted it "can feel fairly subjective at times as a building administrator to make the right decision."
Meanwhile, the Colorado Department of Education doesn't even track when student discipline stems from online or off-campus conduct. Parents have no way to know the scale of the reach into their children's lives.
Consider the contrast. In North Carolina, Democrat legislative candidate Shelly Headen posted that the country's "only hope is an attack on US Soil" targeting red states, compared MAGA to Nazis, and — per Breitbart — posted a photo of herself at the Dachau concentration camp with the words "This is where Trump supporters belong." Headen told WFDD she didn't remember making the posts but apologized, then defended them to The Assembly as "a few angry moments" and compared herself to Jesus, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Lincoln. Her party dropped her, but she remains on the ballot. No expulsion. No permanent record.
A teenager posts something offensive on Snapchat on a Saturday night, and government schools end his education. An adult candidate for office calls for attacks on American soil and says fellow citizens belong in a death camp, and she gets to keep running for the legislature. The administrative state polices your children's phones but can't bring itself to police its own.
The question isn't whether offensive speech is defensible. It's whether government schools — funded by your tax dollars, staffed by public employees — should have the power to reach into your home and punish your child for something said off campus. The First Amendment was written to stop exactly this kind of overreach. Whether the courts remember that is an open question.
