Censored Students Quit School’s Paper Over Principal’s Offer

Evergreen High School’s nine-member newspaper staff quit Thursday after the school’s principal, who censored a news story, suggested that he become co-adviser of the publication.

The Sylmar students announced their resignations from Off the Press as they awaited delivery of the second edition of an underground newspaper they started as an alternative to the school paper.

“Off the Press is dead,” editor Cheryl Newman said.

“It’s a matter of ethics,” added faculty adviser Judith E. Gerson, who resigned along with the students. “That’s not the role I think a principal should play. If he wants to be co-adviser, he can do it without me and without the staff.”

Principal Has Several Roles

Principal Robert Beck said he offered to become co-adviser because faculty often serve in several capacities at the small alternative school for students with disciplinary problems.

“I’m the horticulture teacher, and I’ve taught math and English here,” Beck said. “I didn’t say that I would become a co-adviser, I just made a suggestion.”

But the students interpreted Beck’s proposal as a move to put himself in a position to review all newspaper copy before it was published.

“We won’t accept Mr. Beck as co-adviser,” reporter Shaunn Cartwright said. “It would lead to more censorship.”

The resignations came during a schoolwide controversy over Beck’s decision to delete a sentence from a story in the October edition of the campus paper. Although the sentence did not contain obscene words, Beck found it sexually suggestive and offensive.

The deletion gained widespread attention in the wake of a U. S. Supreme Court decision that restricted the protection high school journalists can claim under the First Amendment. The court ruling gave public-school administrators broad powers to censor school publications.

Besides the Supreme Court’s ruling, local school administrators must follow censorship guidelines established by the state and school districts. For example, Los Angeles Unified School District policy grants principals censorship power if material is libelous, obscene or contains profanity. A 1983 California law grants high school journalists freedom of speech and of the press except in instances where material is obscene, libelous, slanderous or could lead students to disrupt school activities or break laws.

Beck said he believes he was well within his rights when he excised the sentence. But students argued that their constitutional rights were violated. On Wednesday, the students published an off-campus, alternative newspaper that contained the deleted sentence.

The second edition of the alternative paper, called Off the Press Goes Off the Record, featured a caricature of Beck holding a censor stamp and several articles denouncing his decision.