NEW YORK — A federal appeals court has heard arguments in the free-speech case of a Connecticut teenager who claims officials at her high school improperly barred her from serving on the student council because of what she wrote in an Internet blog.

Avery Doninger, 17, of Burlington, Conn., claims officials at Lewis Mills High School violated her First Amendment rights last year after she wrote disparaging comments about them on a Web journal from her home computer.

Her lawyer, Jon L. Schoenhorn, told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on March 4 that what students write on the Internet should not give schools more cause to regulate off-campus speech.

"It's just a bigger soapbox," he said.

Thomas R. Gerarde, an attorney for school officials, argued that administrators should be allowed to act when a student leader makes offensive comments about the school on the Web.

The Internet has completely changed the way students communicate, giving them audiences that can number in the hundreds, said Gerarde, who is representing Principal Karissa Niehoff and former Region 10 Superintendent Paula Schwartz.

A three-judge panel of the appeals court did not issue a ruling after the arguments.

The March 3 hearing was highly contentious and unusually long, lawyers for both sides said. They said the duration signaled that the court considered the case an important one that is raising new legal issues.

Doninger took school officials to federal court last year in an effort to get reinstated as senior class secretary and speak at her graduation.

U.S. District Judge Mark Kravitz denied her request for an injunction that would have put her back on the council. He ruled in August that she did not show she had a "substantial likelihood" to succeed in challenging the constitutional validity of her principal's decision.

Kravitz also said he believed Doninger could be punished for the Internet blog because it addressed school issues and was likely to be read by other students, even though she wrote it at her home.

In her Internet journal, Doninger used an offensive word to describe school officials in criticizing them for canceling the school's annual Jamfest, which is similar to a battle of the bands contest. The event, however, was not canceled and was rescheduled.

School officials discovered the blog entry about two weeks after Doninger posted it. They later refused to allow her to run for re-election as class secretary. Doninger won the election after enough students wrote her name on the ballot, but Niehoff, the principal, did not allow her to serve.

Judges on the appeals court raised a variety of issues during this week's hearing, including the high school's procedures for student council elections and how students' free-speech rights may be affected by the Internet.