November/December 2000 | Contents

TEACHING CENSORSHIP TO THE NEXT GENERATION

BY KEN STEINKEN

In the fall of 1998, during my fourth year as a student newspaper adviser, my world changed. Never in the history of Stevens High School had the Raider Generation been subject to prior administrative review. The newspaper has served as the voice of the students since 1968. But ten years after Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, the Supreme Court decision that granted school officials vast authority over the content of high school papers, the new era hit Rapid City, South Dakota.

A front-page news article about a proposed random drug-search policy set off the change. Particularly offensive to the principal was a staged photo illustration: a student lying in the hallway with a large dog sniffing his chest. If I hadn't been so excited about the effort the photo class put into the photo, I might have anticipated the principal's response. The photo was clearly labeled an illustration but we were chastised because local drug dogs are not allowed to search people. In the future, we were told, the principal would read Raider Generation before it went to press.

At first the opinion page was to be exempt. But soon it, too, fell under the censor's scalpel. Honest, but less-than-complimentary reviews of several student music and drama presentations met with administrative disapproval, as did a post-Columbine piece about the fallacy of thinking that there are ways to make a school totally safe. The paper was banned from reviewing student productions. The Columbine article was ordered to be replaced with a statement from the administration designed to reassure students of their safety.

I was already tenured when I took over the adviser position. During my first four years as a teacher the principal and I had open discussions about the newspaper and its content. I explained things. She made suggestions. I listened and she listened.

I had never sought confrontation with the administration, and had always worked to help the students understand the responsibilities that go hand in hand with freedom of speech, to ask the ethical question, "Should we do this?" as well as "Can we do this?"

I constantly reminded them that those covered in articles are people with lives and feelings, not just subjects of a story. After our discussions I left it up to the student editors to make the final decisions.

A student newspaper adviser lives in a perilous paradox. I must champion my students' right to freedom of expression, and I must obey a supervisor who has neither journalistic training nor an understanding of the wall that should exist between the publisher, which my principal considers herself, and the publication. Add to this a principal's concern about the school's public image, and the fact that the publishing costs and adviser's salary are paid by the school district, and you have the ingredients for conflict.

Hazelwood has armed administrators with a weapon to enforce their agenda, whatever that might be, as long as it can be veiled with "legitimate pedagogical concerns," in the words of the Supreme Court. Sadly, all too often the agenda is to teach students lessons about freedom but not to let them experience it.

After a stormy 1998-99 school year, the principal took the journalism and newspaper classes away from me and tried to prevent me from continuing my extracurricular position as the Raider Generation's adviser. I received a scathing evaluation from the principal that accused me of being unprofessional. Had I not been tenured, I could have been fired for no specific reason. Had I refused to remove articles that the administration found objectionable, I could have been dismissed for insubordination.

I was in contact with the Student Press Law Center, the Washington, D.C., organization dedicated to freedom of the student press. But I soon found out that the ideals of the law I had learned at a center workshop in 1997 do not easily translate into the real world. We documented what the center considered a pretty good case. But a law firm to take the case pro bono was not available.

I was able to continue as the school newspaper adviser, thanks to the efforts of the Rapid City Education Association. We made it through the year without any confrontations. Some of the kids who had an interest in testing boundaries had graduated. The principal decided to focus on other things. I am teaching journalism again.

So the pressure's off, for now at least. But I have to wonder. What about all those other schools where the newspaper adviser is not tenured, or is intimidated by the administration? What lessons will the student staffs of those newspapers learn?

Maybe they'll be better prepared for a wall-free world of journalism. Maybe they won't revolt when the publisher shares profits with the subject of a special section or when the editor promises positive editorial coverage to a mayor who endorses a newspaper's proposed merger. Maybe the world is changing for all of us.

Ken Steinken (kensteinken@juno.ccom) teaches journalism and English at Stevens High School in Rapid City, South Dakota, and has been a part-time staff writer for the Rapid City Journal since 1986.