A high school kid in Florida has won a court battle for every university student.

She is Katherine Evans, now 19, and she won a federal court’s approval in Miami last week to continue with a First Amendment lawsuit against her former school, Pembroke Pines Charter High School, for suspending her after she created a Facebook group critical of a teacher.

So why is this good for us?

BRAZEAL

Because our constitutional guarantee of the right to peaceably air grievances and petition our government — through any means, Facebook included — just gained an extra layer of validation.

Like Evans, we are students at a government-run public school. And also like Evans, our speech rights at school are limited. 

I think this is sometimes for the better — truly threatening or blatantly disruptive language has no place in education, and protests or rallies must not disrupt the flow of traffic or endanger public safety.

 But many high schools and universities abuse these limits. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that free speech “doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse door.”

 Yet subsequent court cases slowly have strangled our ability to express our views and ideas both on and off campus.

UGA, for example, has received a “red light rating” — the lowest possible — from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which monitors speech codes in higher education. 

The chief UGA culprit is a housing policy that prohibits “acts of intolerance that harm or threaten to harm a person or group” including “verbal attacks and/or physical acts on students and/or their property, as well as jokes, posters and comments.”

The problem is that “intolerance” doesn’t mean anything concrete. The definition of offensive behavior is different for everyone. 

Our school has crafted a policy that is unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, and this restricts our right to express our ideas, as crude or crass as they may be. 

Georgia Tech was sued over a similar policy four years ago, and the school subsequently loosened its speech restrictions.

Are not universities — and to a lesser degree high schools — supposed to be open forums for thought and debate? 

Ideas should be exchanged, and we should be able to enlighten ourselves with knowledge that we might not have found otherwise. 

Limiting that openness through a misguided sense of social responsibility restricts the effectiveness of education and leaves students at an intellectual disadvantage.

That’s why in Miami, U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Garber struck a positive blow for our speech rights, ensuring that our opinions, including criticism of our professors, cannot be stripped by overzealous administrators looking to protect our sensitive feelings.

To be sure, Evans’ Facebook group — “Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I’ve ever met” — is hardly a bastion of intellectualism or debate.

 In fact, it’s cruel and in poor taste. 

However, it does not threaten violence — a major concern for schools following recent classroom shootings. It also does not disrupt the school’s educational mission. Any teacher who cannot handle student disapproval should not be in the classroom.

Our Founding Fathers believed freedom of speech to be the pillar of a democratic society and that it should be protected at all costs. 

With forums for public debate growing by the day, it is important that all of us — in new media, and old — are free to spread opinion. 

Hopefully, Evans’ case is the first of many that ease campus speech restrictions and solidify our rights.

— Michael Brazeal is a senior from Marietta majoring in newspapers and real estate