Obscenity Hint Brings About Confiscation of Newspaper

The principal of Ocean View High School in Huntington Beach said Friday that he confiscated 2,500 student newspapers because the word effing, contained in a front page headline, might offend some staff, students and members of the community.

Principal John Myers called the censorship regrettable but justified because a student paper reflects “not just kids’ opinions but the opinion and philosophy of the school.”

Myers said he would have taken the same action regardless of January’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing a high school principal in Hazelwood, Mo., to delete student articles on teen-age pregnancy and divorce from the student paper. The court ruled that the paper is not a public forum.

“I don’t think the word (a reference to an obscenity) was acceptable in our community, even though it wasn’t spelled out,” Myers said.

Article on Model U.N.

Also, he said there was no correlation between the headline, “There’s No Effing Way,” and the story, which described a March student trip to a Model United Nations program in Berkeley.

“It was just an oversight and lack of communication by all concerned,” said the paper’s adviser, Les Honig. The student who wrote it “did not directly use a profanity. He was not malicious, it was more of an innuendo.”

Roderick Castro, 16, next year’s editor of the student paper, the Breeze, said he wrote the headline as an inside joke for the 30 to 40 students who attended the program.

“Whenever a person was asked a complicated question, instead of answering, they said ‘There’s no effing way.’ We didn’t want to say the bad word, so we substituted that.”

Castro said he now believes that the headline was “bad journalism,” but only because it did not pertain to the story.

But co-editor James Peterson called the recall a violation of First Amendment rights. “We feel regardless of the Supreme Court ruling, the principal doesn’t have the right to take away your First Amendment rights, freedom of the press and freedom of speech. We don’t feel (that) just because we’re students, we have limited rights.”

Papers to Be Recycled

A third of the papers had already been passed out when Myers asked for, and received, their return. Friday afternoon, the papers sat in his office waiting to be recycled. He said he plans to reprint the paper, minus the offensive word, with money from his own budget.

He said he usually tries to avoid censorship by working with advisers ahead of time. “I don’t believe in it (censorship); it’s stifling,” he said.

Peterson said he will meet with Myers on Tuesday to discuss an article criticizing the principal’s action.

“I think it’s great,” Myers said about the criticism.

“Kids have a right to express their opinion. I just insist they interview me and understand the issue. . . . I could have gone either way. The kids laughed in class, the few that saw it. It wasn’t a big deal and probably wouldn’t be for the majority of the community.”