‘I said what I wanted and didn’t get into too much trouble for it.’

It may not mean much in the ongoing battle over First Amendment rights, but a Rosemead High School senior says he struck a blow this week for freedom of the press.

The school’s principal, however, called the student’s action out of line and sent him home for half a day.

Michael Utley, editor of the school’s newspaper, the Panther’s Tale, published an underground pamphlet that he said contained articles the school’s principal would not allow in the school paper.

Utley said his time and the $80 he spent printing 300 copies of the “Senior Journal” were well worth making his point.

“I said what I wanted and didn’t get into too much trouble for it,” the 18-year-old senior said. “Both sides were heard, the principal and me.”

But Principal John Rushing, the target of part of the unauthorized editorial barrage, said he was hard pressed to see what good had been accomplished.

“Mike’s a very opinionated young man,” Rushing said. “Often he has difficulty seeing both sides of the picture. It’s really unfortunate that he feels that way and chose to pursue it.”

The Journal came out the same day seniors at Rosemead were being punished for “Ditch Day,” when most of the class took an unauthorized holiday. As a result, Rushing told the seniors they would have to spend a full day in class Monday when they were scheduled to have a half-day of school.

Utley planned to attack that decision in the Panther’s Tale, but was told by Rushing, the legal publisher of the school newspaper, that he could not. The underground newspaper carried an account of that decision.

Rushing said he did not allow the article to appear in the school paper because it would be an agitation. He said Utley was sent home for distributing an unapproved pamphlet on campus.

Headlined “Seniors Punished by RHS Principal,” the article lambasted Rushing’s decision and included impassioned defenses of freedom of the press for student publications.

In the article, Utley called the half-day punishment a “provocation” and warned of a retaliation by seniors.

But thus far, the only retaliation has been Utley’s “Senior Journal.”

“While I am sure our principal studied history as a college student, it is obvious that he did not retain much of it,” the article said. “Otherwise, he would have known that retaliation is a two-way street--leading nowhere.”

At the end of the account, an editorial note stated: “This article was originally scheduled to appear in the June 10th issue of the Panther’s Tale, Rosemead High School’s so-called student newspaper. It was censored by Principal John Rushing on May 26.”

Besides the Ditch Day story, Utley’s paper also carried stories on an asbestos problem at the school and a January U.S. Supreme Court ruling giving school administrators wide latitude to censor student publications. It also included an editorial drawing containing an obscene gesture.

Upon reflection, Utley said he would do it again but omit the cartoon: “People who were serious about it (the censorship issue) were upset by that.”

Rushing, who argued that Utley’s comments about punishing seniors for Ditch Day do not reflect those of the senior class, said the student was bright and a good writer, but overreacted to a relatively small editorial difference.

Utley said Rushing “was not such a bad guy.”

In the end, the two have agreed to disagree. Utley, who will graduate tonight, cited a remark by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

“The most essential constitutional protection is not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thoughts we hate.”