High School Students Win Right to Publish Sex Poll

Foothill High School journalism students may publish the results of their poll on teen-age sex habits and knowledge about AIDS under a settlement reached Wednesday between an editor of the school newspaper and the Tustin Unified School District.

The settlement resolves a lawsuit filed earlier this month by Sean Flynn, 17, who charged that administrators had barred the paper from covering controversial subjects. Supt. Maurice A. Ross has denied that assertion.

In addition to permitting the paper, the Knightlife, to run the poll’s results in its June 3 edition, the district agreed to draw up guidelines for review of student articles in the future.

Flynn’s attorney, Carol Sobel of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the guidelines will follow the California Education Code. State law, Sobel said, grants student journalists more freedom than afforded by a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision giving school administrators broad authority over student publications.

“I think we’ve been successful,” said Flynn, a Knightlife editorial page editor. “They basically agreed to everything we asked for.”

School officials said they were pleased the issue did not reach the courts and added that they had intended to revise their publications policy anyway.

In the Foothill case, administrators had refused to allow editors to distribute during class time a poll that asked students about their sexual habits and their opinions of the school’s sex education program.

On May 4, Orange County Superior Court Commissioner Eleanor M. Palk issued a temporary restraining order against the district that permitted the students to distribute the poll during the lunch hour.

The students did so on May 6, circulating 300 surveys and receiving 139 responses, said Knightlife feature editor Curtis Hsia, 17. Thirty-nine percent of students responding said they were sexually active, and only 12% agreed that the school’s sex education class was adequate in its presentation of information on acquired immmune deficiency syndrome and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Ross said that administrators objected not to the poll itself but only to its distribution during class time.

“We never said the students were not sexually active, we just said it wasn’t our business to find out,” he said. “If they want to print the (poll’s) results, that’s all right with us.”