Garden Grove School Officials Win Right to Censor Paper

California public school officials have the authority to block distribution of an issue of a student newspaper if they believe that it contains false and damaging statements, a state appellate court ruled Monday.

The opinion issued by the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana generally approved of the actions of the Garden Grove Unified School District administrators who blocked distribution of a 1984 April Fools’ Day issue of the school paper at Rancho Alamitos High School.

Principal James DeLong ordered the action because the paper contained a picture of five female students who were jokingly described as standing in line to pose for a nude photo layout in Playboy Magazine.

American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Gary Williams said the appellate court decision gives school administrators the authority to restrain student publications but provides no guidelines for exercising that authority. An appeal of the decision is possible, according to Williams, a visiting professor at Loyola University School of Law.

Garden Grove officials expressed satisfaction with the ruling.

“We’re real pleased with it and happy,” Supt. Ed Dundon said.

Monday’s ruling and a U.S. Supreme Court decision last month in a Missouri case that upheld censorship of a school paper show that both courts “are cognizant of the real problems facing local school administrators,” Dundon said.

David Leeb, the student editor who sued the Garden Grove district in 1984, could not be reached for comment.

In Monday’s decision, written by Justice Thomas F. Crosby Jr., the court concluded that the school district does need to revise its rules to tighten the conditions under which an administrator may step in.

But because Leeb was allowed to appeal immediately to Dundon, who supported DeLong, he suffered no harm, the court said.

The ACLU attacked a state statute that allows censorship under certain circumstances as a violation of the California Constitution’s free-speech clause. That statute provides broad freedoms for student papers but includes limited exceptions to those freedoms--such as a publication resulting in libel.

The district should have allowed publication and then disciplined students found to have acted improperly, the ACLU argued.

The court disagreed and found “practical considerations” that distinguish commercial newspapers from student publications.

The school district owes all students consideration, according to the opinion: “Surely, a school district owes as great a duty to the prospective student victim of a defamation as it does to the student editor.” DeLong, now principal of Garden Grove High School, said the incident in 1984 was the only time he has blocked publication of a student newspaper.

“We’ve had articles in our newspaper on AIDS, on birth control and on other controversial topics,” DeLong said. “What we are looking for is fairness and equity. We want all the facts to be presented.”

DeLong said that, after he learned of the 1984 article, he interviewed all five girls involved and concluded that they had not given “totally informed consent” to the use of the photograph.

He also said the father of one of the girls had “expressed his anger, shock and outrage to me and stated that the picture invaded his daughter’s privacy and was damaging to his daughter’s reputation.”

The unidentified father was reported to have said he felt that publication would hold his daughter up to “ridicule,” DeLong said.

The case drew the attention of the California School Boards Assn., which filed a brief supporting the district. The association represents 895 local school districts and about 5,000 elected board members across the state.

If the court had accepted the ACLU’s position, local schools would have been left in the disastrous position of being unable to control any aspect of student publications while remaining responsible for any damage done, according to the association.

DeLong decided to confiscate all copies of the April 1, 1984, edition of the school paper, La Voz del Vaquero, when he learned that it was too late to delete the offending photograph.

He found the article to be “inappropriate” and potentially “libelous.” The girls were fully clad in the photograph.

The April Fools’ Day issue was traditionally a cover-to-cover spoof. The issue in question also contained reports that singing star Michael Jackson would perform at a school dance, that the Los Angeles Raiders had scheduled a football game against the school team and that Spring Break had been canceled.

“They used their power to censor an innocuous piece,” the ACLU’s Williams said. “That was our point--the authority given to the principal was far too broad.”

Unlike in many other states, the law in California grants wide freedoms to student editors and writers.

That freedom is subject to exceptions under which administrators can intervene to prevent the publication of harmful false statements or of material that poses a clear danger of disruption of classes or illegal activity.

The ACLU maintained, and the court agreed, that California law allows administrators less latitude than school officials were given in a widely publicized case last month. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld broad censorship powers for administrators at a Missouri high school, allowing them to exercise editorial control over school publications based on “legitimate pedagogical concerns.”