Katherine Evans, a former student at Pembroke Pines Charter High School in Pembroke Pines, Fla., alleges that the November 2007 disciplinary action — which also included removing her from Advanced Placement classes that carried bonus grade-point-average weight — violated her First Amendment rights.

Attorneys for Evans filed a complaint Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, seeking a declaration that Principal Peter Bayer violated her constitutional rights, along with an order directing the school to purge all mention of the discipline from Evans' record, nominal monetary damages and attorney fees.

The dispute stems from a page that Evans posted on Facebook, a social-networking Web site, denouncing her AP English teacher for her "insane antics" and inviting others to "express your feelings of hatred" by posting messages to the site. According to the complaint filed with the court, the Web site was up for only two days, over a weekend, and was not seen by the teacher before Evans voluntarily pulled it down. The Facebook site attracted only three posted comments, all of them supporting the teacher and criticizing Evans.

Evans was disciplined on the grounds of violating Broward County school board policies against "Bullying / Cyber bullying / Harassment towards a staff member" and "Disruptive behavior," according to a copy of her Notice of Suspension attached to the complaint.

The complaint contends that punishing Evans for purely off-campus speech that created no disruption at school violated her right to free speech. Attorneys Randall Marshall and Maria Kayanan of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida staff and outside legal counsel Matthew D. Bavaro filed the complaint.

"Students cannot be punished for posting comments online from their home computers criticizing their teachers. Absent a credible threat of harm, criticism is protected by the First Amendment," Kayanan, associate legal director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a news release.

A complaint represents merely the allegations of one side in a legal dispute, and the other side is permitted to file an answer responding to the allegations. Charles Dodge, superintendent of the Pembroke Pines charter school system, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that he was unaware of the lawsuit and could not comment.

Student online speech is a prolific area of First Amendment litigation. The Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear oral arguments Wednesday in the case of Layshock v. Hermitage School District, in which a Pennsylvania school district is appealing a lower court's ruling that the district violated a student's First Amendment rights by suspending him for posting sarcastic comments mocking his principal on a MySpace page.