High School Questions:
My son is editor of his school newspaper. Last month his principal didn't like an article that a reporter wrote, so he made my son take it out before printing the paper. Can he do that? Why or why not?
Answers:
Looks like he already did. What you really want to know is: 1. was it legal for him to censor high school writing? and 2. in the future, how can your son prevent the principal from trampling students' First Amendment right to a free press.
According to the legal eagles at the Student Press Law Center (SPLC), it depends. That's because the law treats these cases differently based on whether the K12 grades school is private or public and whether or not the publication is an official product of the school.
Two Supreme Court decisions -- Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier and Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District -- define the level of First Amendment protection public high school students are entitled to. Together, these cases define the questions that must be asked and the standards school officials must meet before they can legally censor.
Basically, if your son's paper is not sponsored officially by the school, or if it has established an "open forum" where students have been given the authority to make their own content decisions, then your son may have been illegally censored.
In order to legally censor, school officials must be able to show that their censorship is based on a reasonable forecast that the article would have caused a disruption of school activities or an invasion of the rights of others.