Stop The Student Presses

By Richard Lacayo

The Bill of Rights isn't stamped "for adults only." The U.S. Supreme Court has said as much in the past, acknowledging that public school students do not give up their constitutional rights when they step onto school property. But the Justices have also recognized that the need for an orderly school environment sometimes imposes limits on those rights. In recent years, for example, the majority has voted to permit the search of student possessions without a warrant and has allowed school officials to suspend a student for making sexual innuendos in a speech. The Justices were in that mood again last week when, in a 5 to 3 ruling, the court upheld a high school principal's right to censor a student newspaper.

The case, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, involved a publication called Spectrum, produced every few weeks by journalism students at Hazelwood East High School near St. Louis. In May 1983, Principal Robert Reynolds summarily ordered two articles deleted from the paper. One featured the experiences of three Hazelwood students who had become pregnant; the second dealt with the impact of parental divorce on students. Though the girls in the first piece were given pseudonyms, Reynolds believed that they were identifiable, that the article was too frank for younger students and that its overall picture of teenage pregnancy was too positive (sample quote: "This experience has made me a more responsible person. I feel that now I am a woman"). In the second article, a student complained that her father was "always out of town on business or out late playing cards with the guys." Reynolds objected that the piece failed to give the father's viewpoint.

Three students who worked on the Spectrum brought suit, alleging a violation of their First Amendment right to free expression. They had some reason to suppose that the courts might agree. In its landmark 1969 Tinker decision, the Supreme Court held that a school acted unconstitutionally when it suspended students for wearing black armbands to class in protest against the Viet Nam War. Schools may curtail those rights, the court ruled, only when the student expression substantially disrupts schoolwork or discipline, or invades the rights of others.

Writing for the majority in last week's case, Justice Byron White saw a distinction. While the First Amendment prevented a school from silencing certain kinds of student expression, he said, it did not also require a school actively to promote such expression in plays and publications produced under its auspices. White, who had joined the majority in the Tinker case, ruled this time that educators may exert editorial control in such instances "so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns." Such concerns, he noted, might extend to work that is "poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences."

Justice William Brennan, in a dissent joined by Justices Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun, strongly rejected the notion that school-sponsored speech was less worthy of protection than any other. He complained that the new ruling might permit school officials to censor anything that personally offended them. "The young men and women of Hazelwood East expected a civics lesson," he lamented, "but not the one the court teaches them today."

Educators were happy with the decision and discounted fears of a wave of high school repression. "The only thing this will do is make principals feel more comfortable in exercising control when they see it as necessary," says Ivan Gluckman, attorney for the National Association of Secondary School Principals. For his part, Principal Reynolds says he has no plans to increase his oversight of the Spectrum, and insisted that the paper would not shy away from sensitive issues.

Andrea Callow, the student who wrote the article on teenage pregnancy, was more concerned. "If student journalists want to write about a subject like teen pregnancy, they are going to be hesitant," says Callow, now a journalism student at the University of Missouri. The ruling is especially troubling, says Steven Shapiro of the American Civil Liberties Union, because there was nothing vulgar about the censored articles. "Here we are dealing with clearly serious and responsible student speech."

Ironically, the decision may help create the conditions for a feistier kind of student journalism. The court did not give schools the power to suppress independently produced student publications. The underground newspaper, a familiar sight in many schools 20 years ago, may be ripe for a comeback.

With reporting by Anne Constable/ Washington