Student Journalists: ‘People want to give students a voice until they hear what they have to say’

With recent events leading to an increase in the public’s reliance on journalism, student journalists should be excited to use their voices. But many are disheartened at the obstacles they face when they try to report the news.

Many journalism students all over the country face the requirements of “prior review” and “prior restraint.” The former is when school officials demand to read or preview student media before its publication or distribution; the latter is when school officials take action to inhibit, ban, or restrain publication, according to the National Scholastic Press Association.

In the 1988 Supreme Court decision Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the question arose of whether a principal’s deletion of articles (in this case, on teen pregnancy and parents’ divorce) violated the students’ First Amendment rights. According to Oyez, an unofficial online archive of the U.S. Supreme Court, “The Court held that the First Amendment did not require schools to affirmatively promote particular types of student speech.… Educators did not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the content of student speech so long as their actions were ‘reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.’ ”

Neither actions are illegal, but they are also not required. In the 1968 Supreme Court decision Tinker v Des Moines Independent Community School District, three students wore black armbands as a sign of protest of the Vietnam War. The school principals created a policy that would suspend anyone who was wearing an armband, but the students refused to take them off. The students’ parents then sued the school district for violating their right of expression.

According to Oyez, “The Court … held that the students did not lose their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech when they stepped onto school property. In order to justify the suppression of speech, the school officials must be able to prove that the conduct in question would materially and substantially interfere with the operation of the school.” This led to the “substantial disruption test,” which means that a school can abridge a student’s First Amendment right if it “disrupts or interferes” with the learning environment.

Santa Fe High’s administration almost never censors The Demon Tattler, but adviser Ms. Gerber says that she tends to self-censor. “There are a lot of very brave newspaper advisers out there who truly serve as the ‘watchdog press’ for their school, but I just don’t have that kind of personality,” she said.

“I focus more on trying to develop young writers, showcasing the school, and creating a publication that students hopefully want to read.…I also like to joke that I am fond of paying my mortgage — I don’t want to have an adversarial relationship with my bosses.”

Ms. Gerber recalled that last year, she was asked to remove a story that unknowingly disclosed some loopholes to graduation requirements. And several years ago, a former principal was upset at a Tattler issue that focused on the theme of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. “That might have been a lapse in judgment,” Ms. Gerber conceded.

However, censorship used to be more of an obstacle for The Demon Tattler. English teacher Mr. Bickett was the adviser for 12 years before Ms. Gerber took over in the fall of 2007. He says that he encouraged students to do hard-hitting stories because the community thought that the student newspaper’s job was to do something more like a newsletter, not more complex issues, but the students weren’t really eager to do difficult stories.

He described that the only time a story was censored was when the school district allegedly lost $2.6 million, which affected all activities, including publications. The newspaper’s budget got cut and it couldn’t be printed that year.

“We never released that story because no one could really come up with the facts of what happened,” he said. After that, school administration asked to review the paper before it went to print. They would look over all the pages, allegedly to see if the facts not reported correctly.

Another time, the paper was pulled because they published an April Fools issue that included a number of stories that “lacked sensitivity” and offended some people.

Mr. Bickett said that many people in administration and teaching think that kids in journalism shouldn’t try to do things that are high risk. He continued, “People want to give students a voice until they hear what they have to say.”

He said that he ultimately stopped being an adviser because “I couldn’t promise a newspaper that would make my supervisors comfortable.”

Megan McGuire, a journalism student in Lake Havasu, Ariz., has faced a lot of backlash from administrators while working on her school newspaper. “Most of the censorship I’ve faced happens before my fingertips even hit the keyboard,” she said, explaining that she and her classmates constantly self-censor because they know the administration will not let them report on many topics.

But the press freedom bill New Voices, a legislative project of the Student Press Law Center, could reduce the power that school administrators have over student publications. In general, the initiative serves to protect students against administrative censorship as well as protect teachers and faculty against retaliation when their students exercise their First Amendment rights, according to the SPLC’s website.

New Voices legislation has passed in 13 states. California was the first to pass its version of the law in 1977, and Washington passed it most recently, in March 2018. (State lawmakers can amend the bill in whatever way they choose, but the gist remains the same.)

North Dakota passed the law in April 2015. Brayden Zenker, who works on his school newspaper in Bismarck, N.D., said their school publication was very young at the time the bill passed, which is why they worked so hard on advocating to get it passed. He said the bill has paid a huge part in their publication: “We were built on a great foundation… We have never had to worry about being censored. This has allowed us to always publish the complete truth of every issue we tackle.”

The SPLC offers resources for students who struggle with censorship in their publications. The organization describes itself as, “The nation’s only legal assistance agency devoted exclusively to educating high school and college journalists about the rights and responsibilities embodied in the First Amendment, and supporting the student news media in covering important issues free from censorship.”

Mimi Fhima, a student journalist in Minneapolis, Minn., reached out to SPLC when the students of St. Louis Park Senior High School sued over whether their publication had rights to video footage of when a boy ripped off a girl’s hijab in the hallway. They lost the suit but are appealing the decision.

Cody Cline, president of the journalism club at Sturgis Brown High School in Sturgis, S.D., recalls a time when he and fellow student journalists self-censored themselves by not writing about a local story that had gained national attention.

Sturgis Brown students have a tradition of bashing and tearing apart an old car as part of their homecoming events, but this year someone spray painted “go back to the Rez” on the side of the car. (Their rival high school is a Native American school.) In response, the school’s administration cancelled the homecoming game and dance, and the story ended up making national news.

“It wasn’t a big deal until it started to blow up on social media,” Cody said. “It was crazy watching it unfold in the news.” He said he was most frustrated with the way the big news outlets took the story and contorted it into “clickbait” without really fact-checking. But there was an unwritten rule about the school publications — they were not directly told they couldn’t cover the story, but they knew that if they did, it would never get published. Cody continued, “Censorship, not of the story as a whole, but of the storyline and the perspectives that would have been able to be shared was a huge frustration.”

However, many school publications face no review or restraint issues from their administrators, and some are actually making an enormous difference.

The Washington Post published an article about a group of reporters and editors from a high school in southeastern Kansas who had found “some things that just didn’t quite add up” about their new principal. They researched the university where she got her master’s and doctorate degrees and found no evidence of it being an accredited university.

These students conducted a weeks-long investigation and published an article about their principal’s questionable background. Four days later, the principal resigned.

These students received tremendous praise for their work from their community and from renowned journalists, from The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold to Todd Wallack, a reporter for the Spotlight Team of The Boston Globe. They were even invited to the White House Correspondents Dinner, an annual event for reporters.

Journalism is a form of expression for many students. At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where a shooter opened fire just two months ago, publication staff created a special edition of their newspaper, The Eagle Eye, to commemorate the 17 lives lost.

Co-editor in chief of The Eagle Eye, Rebecca Schneid, told NBC News, “It’s very hard to cover tragedy, and sometimes you have to talk about your own emotions. No other publication knows Parkland like we know Parkland.”

Melissa Falkowski, the faculty adviser, said, “This issue will be a testament to these students’ love of their community. It shows the world their talents.”

Former SPLC Executive Director Frank LoMonte wrote a commentary for the 25th anniversary of the Hazelwood decision. In it, he writes, “Student media is the safe haven where students who are not athletic stars or beauty queens find acceptance and self-worth. To tell marginalized students that their opinions have no value is an act of bullying more vicious than any Facebook insult.”