Are High School Journalists Truly Protected by the First Amendment?

In class we looked at the following quote by Harry S. Truman: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” Truman’s words got me thinking about the rights of journalists, especially student journalists in public schools. Are high school journalists truly protected by freedom of speech; or, when applicable, can public school administrators, “silence the voice of opposition?”

            Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier was a 1988 landmark decision by the Supreme Court that held that school publications were subject to low first amendment protections and that a school may exercise control over school sponsored publications. Here, the school principal eliminated two articles in a school publication prior to printing. One of the articles described the pregnancy of a student and included specific sexual content, while the other discussed the impact of divorces on students in the school. The court ruled that the school officials did not violate the students’ First Amendment Rights because the publication was part of a class and as such is school sponsored.

            I completely disagree with this ruling. It is far too easy to find first amendment exceptions based on viewpoint discrimination and camouflage it as “protecting the masses.”  Speaking for the dissenting opinion Judge Brennan wrote, “If mere incompatibility with the school's pedagogical message were a constitutionally sufficient justification for the suppression of student speech, school officials could censor each of the students or student organizations in the foregoing hypotheticals, converting our public schools into ‘enclaves of totalitarianism,’ that ‘strangle the free mind at its source.’ The First Amendment permits no such blanket censorship authority" (Supreme Court Opinion). What Judge Brennan stresses here, which I wholeheartedly agree with, is that just because a student conveys a stance that doesn’t agree with a community’s established morals, that doesn’t give the community officials authority to eliminate that student’s voice.

             Sixteen years later, in Dean v. Utica, a lower court in Michigan delivered a ruling that helped mitigate some of the authority given to school officials in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier. The court ruled on a controversial student written article that revealed that the school’s busses gave off dangerous fumes. The court's majority opinion stated: “If the role of the press in a democratic society is to have any value, all journalists -- including student journalists -- must be allowed to publish viewpoints contrary to those of state authorities without intervention or censorship by the authorities themselves." While this is a step towards speech protection for high school journalists, unfortunately, being a lower court decision, this case only holds as precedent over the Eastern District of Michigan.

            Even though cases like Dean v. Utica mitigate the effects set by Hazelwood, no case has actually challenged it. An article in studentpress.org explains, “Hazelwood significantly narrowed the First Amendment protection available to most public high school student journalists and allowed for greater administrative control over editorial content. While the number of incidents of high school censorship has skyrocketed as a result, students and lawyers - largely because of Hazelwood's vague and seemingly weak limits on administrative censorship - have been hesitant to challenge most censorship in court” (Studentpress: Dean v. Utica ). What this means is that because Hazelwood seems like it's not very limiting, this ruling has not been challenged on a national scale.

And yet, since the Hazelwood ruling, courts have applied this standard not only to school newspapers, but to selections of band songs, assignments, and even school political speeches. By choosing what students can and cannot see, hear, or read, school authorities have the power to shape the minds of America's youth. This is my greatest problem with limiting what students are exposed to in schools. If you go to a school with conservative beliefs, the chances that you grow up conservative are very high, and vice-versa. A school, the way I see it, is the workings of government on a smaller scale. We talked in class about how everyone in a democracy has the right to free speech, even those (if not especially those) that seek to challenge authority. Why then should a school be any different?