It hasn’t gotten any easier to be a student journalist

It’s been more than 40 years, but I can still recall the ruckus that was kicked up when I wrote an editorial for Compton High’s newspaper, the Chimes, complaining about the school’s “staid, hypocritical faculty.”

Some teachers said I should be fired as editor in chief. Others said I shouldn’t be allowed to graduate. But the school’s newspaper advisor and journalism teacher, the sainted Viola Bagwell, stood resolutely by me, and the principal, Doris Westcott, refused to discipline me in any way.

I doubt that I’d be so fortunate were I a high school newspaper editor today.

Censorship of high school papers and disciplining of their editors and reporters are at an all-time high, triggered by a growing disdain for the media in general and by increased pressure on school administrators to “present the right image to the community” in response to mounting budget cuts and federal- and state-mandated educational standards, says Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va.

The most recent manifestation of the crackdown on school papers came in Fullerton last week when officials at Troy High School placed Ann Long on a leave of absence from her job as co-editor in chief of the Oracle.

Long’s “crime” was writing and publishing a story about two bisexual students and one gay student in what she called “an attempt to raise awareness on campus that people with different sexualities go through more emotional stress than the average teenager.”

When I reached Long at her home last week, she told me the three students knew their names and their sexual orientation would appear in the paper. Neither they nor their parents objected, she said.

I read her story and thought it was sensitively done. But school officials told her to resign or be fired, then -- on Monday -- she says they told her she was being placed on leave from her editing duties and would be assigned to cover junior varsity sports until Friday. Because Sunday Calendar is printed before then, I don’t know as I write this what they will have decided Friday, but Long told me she thought they would either fire her or continue her leave of absence indefinitely -- which amount to pretty much the same thing, she said, because “the paper doesn’t really cover JV sports.”

Long says school officials -- none of whom returned my repeated calls -- told her that her story violated a state education code provision that prohibits asking students about their sexuality without written permission from their parents -- which Long did not seek or obtain.

But Goodman says that part of the education code is “aimed only at keeping school officials from invading kids’ privacy by asking them about their sexuality. It’s not intended to govern what students can ask each other.”

Having read the code section, I agree with Goodman. It’s filled with prohibitions against administering any “test, questionnaire, survey, or examination containing any questions about the pupil’s personal beliefs or practices in sex, family life, morality, and religion” without written permission from the student’s parent or guardian.

Long, 18, a senior, said she worked closely with her journalism teacher, Georgette Cerrutti, on the story for more than a month and Cerrutti never told her she had to get the approval of the students’ parents.

Long said Cerrutti is the head of the school’s English department. “She said she was a self-taught journalist, so I don’t think she had any real professional journalism experience,” Long said.

Because neither Cerrutti nor school or district administrators returned my calls, I couldn’t confirm this. But it is typical of what is happening in high schools nationwide. As budgets are cut, journalism programs are often eliminated or combined with English departments, where teachers -- their skills in literature and grammar notwithstanding -- often lack the journalistic background to give students proper guidance in the practice and, especially, the ethics of newspaper work.

Goodman says attempts to limit the kinds of stories that school newspapers can publish have increased dramatically ever since a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that high school administrators in suburban St. Louis had the right to censor stories about pregnancy and the effects of divorce on children. He says many school administrators “misread the Hazelwood decision to say that students no longer had any 1st Amendment protection. That’s absolutely not what the court said.”

A question of reasonable

Indeed, the court ruling said schools had to present a reasonable educational justification for censorship. Among those justifications could be stories that were “ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences.” Stories could also be censored if they could “associate the school with anything other than neutrality on matters of political controversy or if they “might reasonably be perceived to advocate drug or alcohol use, irresponsible sex or conduct otherwise inconsistent with the ‘shared values of a civilized social order.’ ”

That covers a lot of territory -- too much for then-Justice William J. Brennan, whose dissenting opinion said the court’s decision “aptly illustrates how readily school officials (and courts) can camouflage viewpoint discrimination as the ‘mere’ protection of students from sensitive topics.”

“Such unthinking contempt for individual rights is intolerable from any state official,” Brennan wrote. “It is particularly insidious from one to whom the public entrusts the task of inculcating in its youth an appreciation of the cherished democratic liberties that our Constitution guarantees.”

But school administrators embraced the court’s decision with open arms and closed minds. By 1993, Goodman says, his office was receiving more than 170 requests a year from student journalists seeking guidance and legal help in fighting censorship. That number climbed every year and now tops 500 annually.

“School administrators increasingly see student media as a thorn in their side, a thorn they can best handle by simply silencing them,” he says.

Growing public hostility toward virtually all media give these administrators confidence that they can do so without inciting public outrage.

Even many high school students don’t seem to understand the importance of freedom of the press. A survey of more than 100,000 students by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation released last week showed that 36% think newspapers should have to get “government approval” of stories before publication, and 32% said the press has “too much freedom.”

Those numbers are frightening. Students and the general public alike should be outraged by censorship, on campus or in the professional media.

On campus, the Commission of Inquiry into High School Journalism said in a 1974 report, “Where a free, vigorous student press does exist, there is a healthy ferment of ideas and opinions, with no indication of disruption or negative side effects on the educational experience of the school.”

A “healthy ferment of ideas and opinions” is exactly what students should be experiencing in high school. Six states, including California, have enacted laws specifically giving student journalists essentially the same protection from censorship that the 1st Amendment provides professional journalists.

Administrators at Troy High School should brush up on the 1st Amendment. Otherwise, they risk what Goodman calls “a real betrayal of their responsibility to educate children about our democratic freedoms.”

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.