INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Censored: The new age of high school journalism

In February, a sophomore at Woodlan Junior-Senior High School in northeast Indiana wrote a column in the student newspaper urging people to be nice to each other, regardless of their sexual orientation.

After the column appeared, the East Allen County School System insisted that all future issues of the paper be cleared by the principal and attempted to fire the newspaper’s adviser, Amy Sorrell. The school system did not feel that any discussion of sexual orientation in the student newspaper was appropriate.

The system eventually reached a settlement with Sorrell that would have enabled her to teach within the school system, but she left when she found another job at a private school in the area. The sophomore who wrote the column has given up journalism, and the school itself likely will not have a student newspaper this year.

At about the same time at Westfield High School, student journalist John Bender wrote a series of columns for his school’s student newspaper. He aimed for a humorous tone. The school’s newspaper adviser, Bender says, told him that she did not appreciate sarcasm. This year, the school has denied him permission to enroll in the newspaper class, citing, according to Bender, his “inability to create a working relationship with the teacher” as its reason for barring him from the classroom.

At this time last year, Bender thought he wanted to be a journalist. Now he’s not sure.

Two years ago, high school student journalists in Columbus and Noblesville produced well-reported packages on the dangers of oral sex. The school systems in both places tried to suppress the stories.

The year before that, a student journalist at Franklin Central High School wrote a short, straight news story about a fellow student being arrested on murder charges. No one disputed the accuracy of the story, but the school system tried to discipline the newspaper advisor anyway. When an Indianapolis TV newscast sent a reporter over to do a story on the advisor, the school system’s press person ordered the TV reporter off school grounds and then started screaming at her.

The school system eventually reached a settlement with the advisor, who left the school system.

In none of these incidents did the school system disagree with the accuracy of the work.

In all of these cases, the school systems just wanted to shut down the discussion.

Author’s disclosure

At this point, in a normal news story, I would disclose my conflicts of interest and assure everyone that they make no difference. But that is impossible here.

My surface conflicts are many. As the then-president of the Indiana Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, I wrote an op-ed column supporting Amy Sorrell and her students at Woodlan that appeared in newspapers across the state and country. I gave interviews and appeared on talk radio defending them. I did the same with the students in Noblesville and Columbus and with the newspaper advisor at Franklin Central.

The real conflict of interest, though, is more profound.

As the director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, I am a teacher of young journalists. Telling them that the way to honor their profession is to sit down and shut up strikes me as misguided at best and, at worst, just plain wrong.

In this story, I will do what I teach my students to do. I will strive to be fair to all sources.

My first duty here, though, is to you, the reader. For me to be fair to you, you need to know where I stand, so you can take that into account.

Self-censorship

Disputes such as the ones at Woodlan and Franklin Central happen with some frequency.

“We get about a dozen calls, complaints or inquiries every year involving censorship in some way,” said Diana Hadley, executive director of the Indiana High School Press Association, which includes 130 Indiana high schools as members.

Many of the disputes get handled through quiet negotiation and go away without making noise.

A few, though, erupt.

The Woodlan story, for example, made national news. In Indiana, most newspapers ran at least one story on the controversy and many ran several stories.

Beth King, the communications manager for the Society of Professional Journalists, said the story took off for a couple of reasons. The first is that a lot of journalism groups publicized it and a lot of newspapers editorialized in favor of Sorrel and her students.

The other reason is that the school system’s administrators misread the community.

“People are a lot more open and tolerant than some might think. Even if they disagree with something, they still don’t want to see it censored,” King said.

That attention a Woodlan-like situation produces, though, can have an impact.

“When you get a few cases where teachers lose jobs or get disciplined — or students get in trouble — then self-censorship can start to occur,” Hadley said.

That is partly what happened at Westfield High School, John Bender said.

Bender, now a senior, wrote for the school newspaper last year. The starting cornerback on the school football team and a strong student, he said he hopes to attend Northwestern University, the University of California at Berkeley or the University of Iowa and eventually make a living as a writer.

“I’d hoped to work as a journalist, but now that I have seen what can go on, I don’t know if that’s for me,” he said.

What went on, Bender said, is that he got removed from the newspaper staff for reasons he does not understand. He was an opinion editor. His writing generally filled a page of the student newspaper.

He wrote columns about cliques at school and gay marriage that, in particular, seemed to bother his newspaper adviser, Nikki Davis. (Citing student privacy concerns, Davis declined to be interviewed; to see Bender’s column on cliques at school, see nuvo.net.)

“When the trouble started with that other teacher over gay marriage [Sorrell at Woodlan], then things really started to get out of hand,” Bender said.

Bender said that when he wanted to sign up for the newspaper class this year, school officials told him that he couldn’t.

“Mrs. Davis told me that there was no student support for my writing,” Bender said. “But there’s a Facebook page devoted to it where nearly a fourth of the student body has signed up. Students are very upset about this.”

More liberating?

Amy Sorrell said that sounds familiar.

After she arrived at a settlement with East Allen County Schools last spring, she took a job with Keystone School, a small private school of 250 students in Ft. Wayne. She left the school system, she said, in part because she didn’t think that the East Allen County School System would let student journalists write freely.

So far, she has found working at a private school to be liberating.

“There is talk of putting a constitutional thread into the curriculum here, so that the students are taught about the Constitution all the way through their classes,” she said.

Sorrell also occasionally speaks at First Amendment or free press events.

“Not only does the school let me go, but I have administrators asking me if they can go along to show support,” she said.

Sorrell serves as Keystone’s yearbook adviser, but she has plans to build on that.

“I got hired as an English teacher and we didn’t have time to get a newspaper started, but we’re working on that and hope to have one up in January at the start of second semester. People at the school are very excited about having a newspaper,” she said.

Woodlan, her old school, has gone in the opposite direction.

Most of the newspaper staff from last year quit. A couple of Woodlan student journalists travel to a nearby school in the middle of the day to study journalism and work on a student newspaper.

This year, the student newspaper at Woodlan will be filled with essays assigned in English class. Teachers will choose what they consider the best stories for the paper.

“I’m really not sure exactly what the kids will be writing about or what the English teachers have in mind,” said Jan MacLean, deputy superintendent of East Allen County Schools.

Cortney Carpenter, last year’s editor, wants no part of this new version of the paper.

“It really wouldn’t be a paper anymore,” Carpenter told a Ft. Wayne newspaper.

Indiana High School Press Association Executive Director Hadley said that Sorrell’s experience at Woodlan and Keystone is not unusual. In fact, it may be part of a trend.

“It used to be that we told teachers to stay away from private schools because private schools would limit student expression. Now, though, in some cases, we’re seeing the opposite happen. A lot of public schools now are limiting or cracking down on student expression and a lot of the private schools are loosening up and allowing more student expression,” Hadley said.

Many public school administrators believe they have a blanket right to control student expression.

They have seized on language in the Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlemeir Supreme Court decision of nearly 20 years ago. That language says that school principals and superintendents can serve, in effect, as the publishers of high schools’ student newspapers.

Hazelwood also says, though, that administrators must have educationally sound reasons for censoring student newspapers. In addition, the decision also suggests that when superintendents and principals assume the powers of publishers, they also assume the responsibilities and liabilities, meaning that they personally can be held legally responsible for what appears in the student newspaper.

Litigation that might clear up Hazelwood could take years.

Hadley and the IHSPA think they might have a quicker solution. They have been working to get journalism standards added to the core curriculum for Indiana schools.

If adopted, those standards would emphasize how journalism should be practiced. They would include best practices and ethical standards.

Hadley said she thinks that having the standards in place could make disputes such as the ones at Woodlan easier to resolve.

“If we had standards in place,” she said, “then administrators, advisers, students and parents all would be operating with the same set of understandings. We would not be arguing about what journalistic standards are. Instead, we would be discussing if those standards are being applied appropriately.”

The key, she said, is educating people about scholastic journalism.

“A lot of people don’t understand what a student press is or what it’s supposed to do. If we want students to learn how to be ethical journalists, we need to show them what that is and give them the chance to develop.”

Hadley and the IHSPA have been working Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Suellen Reed’s office for the past three years. Hadley said she hopes the state will adopt the standards soon.

“I have lost track of how many revisions we have been through, but I have to believe that we are close,” she said.

In the meantime, another school year has started.

Amy Sorrell said that she’s excited to be at her new school, but that she can’t help thinking about last year’s experiences. She said there is not much she would do differently.

“It was stressful, but I got to speak out about the First Amendment and students’ First Amendment rights. Because of that, a lot of attention got focused on the issue of a student free press. And the public support was fantastic,” she said.

As an example, Sorrell pointed to the public hearing that the school system planned to have regarding her firing. It got cancelled when East Allen County Schools settled with her.

“If I had had to go through with that hearing, we would have had so many parents and students there. The baseball team had a doubleheader scheduled that day and there were parents organizing shuttles so that kids could make it to the hearing and still play. That’s how upset people were,” Sorrell said.

“It’s sad that the school system didn’t seem to learn anything from that.”

 

Confessions of two censored high school writers:

Lesson learned

by John Krull

When I was in high school more than 30 years ago, I wrote a pretty dreadful sports column.

Even though it covered the entire back page of the student newspaper, almost no one read it. Not my friends. Not even my family.

That changed one week.

The football team had a game coming up. It wasn’t an important game — in large part because the football team was struggling. The other school’s team was better.

Until then, I had followed a boosterish line when writing about the school’s sports teams and always predicted victory for the home squad. This time, though, I wrote what I truly thought and predicted that our team would lose, 21-14.

That week, it seemed that everyone read my column.

When I walked through the halls, I saw students huddled at their lockers, reading and rereading my column. Friends and other classmates accosted me in the cafeteria, at my locker and in the restroom. Most said, with some heat, that I lacked school spirit. A few said that my column gave them a sense of relief.

On game night, an assistant coach waved my column around in the locker room and yelled at the football team, “Krull doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground! Go show him that!”

The head football coach asked to meet with me. He told me I was a disappointment to him, to the school, to my family and, I think, to the entire human race.

A guidance counselor told me pretty much the same thing that the head coach did.

I was 17 and not used to that kind of attention.

The next week in the column, I made a bad joke about the football coaches’ lack of perspective. The sports editor and newspaper advisor axed the joke, as they should have.

I got suspended from the newsroom for a month.

Curiously, though, the paper continued to run my column while I was on suspension. At the end of the year, the school gave me an award for being the outstanding newspaper staff member, making me — I’m pretty sure — the only person in the school’s history to be both suspended and so honored in the same year.

Normally, I have a hard time recalling what I thought or learned when I was a teenager.

The lessons of this experience, though, are clear in my memory.

I learned that it was important to keep cool in the face of anger and hostility. I learned that people can go absolutely nuts about relatively trivial things.

Most important, I learned that when you try to tell the truth about things that matter to other people, they may get angry with you and they may not like you, but they will pay attention to what you say.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, the game’s final score was 21-7. If I’d taken a touchdown away from our team, I’d have gotten the prediction exactly right.

The principle of the principal

By David Hoppe

We learn many things during the years we spend in high school. Among the most important lessons are those dealing with what it takes to navigate your way through a hierarchy in which power is distributed unequally from the top down.

In my case, the instruction took place in the fall of 1968 at Prospect High School in a northwest suburb of Chicago.

I was the executive editor of The Prospector, a weekly school paper. Part of my job involved writing a column. For the most part, I wrote about such evergreen teenage issues as cliques and conformity, fitting in and standing out. As long as I stayed in my teenage place, I was fine.

The trouble was that the larger world kept crowding in. Just weeks before school started, the Democrats held their national convention in Chicago and the city went insane. There were riots and arrests. At the center of the action was an organization called Students for a Democratic Society. SDS organizers were, among other things, trying to mobilize students to take action against the war in Vietnam.

There was a political science club at Prospect that invited outside lecturers to come and speak at meetings after school. Usually this meant bringing in a member of the League of Women Voters or some local party hack to talk about the importance of voting and the glories of the two-party system. But that fall, somebody got the bright idea to ask a member of SDS to come and speak.

School let out at 3:30. Shortly after that, a member of SDS arrived on campus to make his presentation to the club, whose members were sitting upstairs in a classroom. A couple of these geeks went down to greet their guest; when they got to the school entrance, they found an assistant principal, Mr. Kunen, already there, blocking the door and telling the SDS guy to beat it. They asked Mr. Kunen what gave him the right to deny the SDS guy access to the building. Mr. Kunen muttered something about an Illinois statute forbidding Marxists from speaking in public schools. SDS wasn’t a Marxist organization, but never mind.

That was supposed to be the end of it.

I was a high school journalist, and I smelled a story. So I wrote a column called “Fear in Suburbia,” about how the SDS guy was turned away before he could give his point of view.

The school administration didn’t like the idea of seeing a description of this episode in print. I was told to write a new column. Fine: I wrote a column about having my column squelched. Suddenly, I was sitting in the principal’s office, being told calmly but very firmly by a man wearing a boxy dark suit and white socks that there were limits to what I could write about, and it was my job to stay within those limits.

I was also told that the incident with the SDS guy never happened.

Being reminded I was just a kid was bad enough. Learning that the people who basically ran my world were making up what passed for reality as it pleased them was too much.

Next thing I knew, I was talking to a columnist with the Daily Herald, the main paper in the Chicago suburbs. He offered to run my piece in his space, and I said that sounded fine. A week later “Fear in Suburbia” was being tossed up on front porches across a broad swatch of Chicagoland.

The principal at my high school was not amused. I was summarily informed that, henceforth, my writing would no longer appear in any school publications. What’s more, upon graduation, I was also declared persona non grata at Prospect. I must say this Latin flourish was quite a capper.

Oddly enough, the rest of the year was the best of my high school career. I got good grades and dated the queen of the Christmas Ball. The Beatles’ White Album came out and blew my mind as well as those of all my friends.

Most of all, though, I learned something very important about life in this Republic: to never, ever expect the principal to care about anybody’s hindquarters but his own.

 

Take Action

The American Civil Liberties Union is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to protecting the rights given to all citizens by the Indiana and United States Constitutions.

What: A lunchtime ACLU panel discussion entitled “The School Paper: Who decides what is news?”

Why: The panel will be discussing recent censorship issues in Indiana public schools and what rights student journalists are entitled to.

Where: Indiana History Center, 450 W. Ohio St.

When: noon until 12:50 p.m.

Who: Hosted by the ACLU First Wednesday series, which is sponsored by the NUVO Social Justice Series 2007.

For more information, check out www.aclu-in.org or call 317-635-4059.

 

Resources for high school advisors and journalists

Student Press Law Center
www.splw.org

Their mission is to provide high school and college journalists with free legal assistance for matters dealing with their First Amendment rights and censorship. The Web site provides a detailed test for censorship protection under Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlemeir. SPLC also offers free legal advice from a virtual lawyer, along with many other resources.

Indiana High School Press Association
www.ihspa.franklincollege.edu

The IHSPA is dedicated to protecting and educating students about their First Amendment rights and censorship.

American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana
www.aclu-in.org

The ACLU helps Indiana citizens fight for their rights as outlined in the Indiana and United States Constitutions. They are available for legal advice.

 
John Bender's censored story

Journalists can change the world with their writing. They can influence public opinion on a great number of crucial issues, from abortion to capital punishment to foreign relations.

However, this story is going to be about something much more important than all of those things: cliques in Westfield High School. Namely, their harmful effects. It will be informative and opinionated. That is this story's function.

To illustrate how warped your viewpoint can become when you label people, I am going to exaggerate certain stereotypes about each clique in our school.

For those of you who do not know what a clique is, it is an exclusive group with a unique identity that contains people of similar tastes. It is pronounced click, like the surprisingly funny Adam Sandler movie. Click was his best movie since Tommy Boy.
One clique in our school is the Preps. They are very prepared, like the name. This is evident in their tendency to wear up to three shirts at once. You know, in case they spill.

Some people berate the Preps for being well-groomed and wearing Axes and Tags. In response, the Preps intimidate people by popping up their collars so they look like Count Chocula. It is a fascinating interaction.

Goths. The Goths are people with faulty tear ducts. To compensate, they draw tears on their faces. They can still be happy though, because they could just say they’re laughing so hard they’re crying, or they just ate some peppers or something.
The Goth culture is heavily predicated upon being non-conformist. This means that they lack the flexibility to twist their bodies into uncomfortable positions. They would not make good carnies.

Jocks. Jocks rule the school. They spend all of their time beating up members of the Nerds clique. They get all the girls. But most importantly, they bear the sacred responsibility of carrying on the mediocre athletic tradition here at WHS.

Jocks are easy to spot because they are the ones wearing those ridiculous green and white jackets. You know, with the big W on them. W for Winner! Or maybe an upside-down M. M for Mediocrity!

Nerds are the natural prey of the Jocks. They play Halo 2 so they can pwn noobs. This is very essential to their happiness, because noobs are the only people they are capable of pwning.

Be nice to the Nerds, because they will all be your bosses someday. Or they will have to save the world by squaring off against a renegade computer system in a challenge of wits. This is a serious warning. They have already had their revenge, four times over.

I was referring to the fact that there have been four Revenge of the Nerds movies, which is absitively ridonkulous. Moving on now.

Then there's the Stoners clique. Or potheads. Or druggies. Whichever term is the least offensive. They are known for their vacant expressions and hacky sack prowess. They are not to be confused with the Hippies clique, which is very similar but without the drugs. Or with the drugs, really. But Hippies have longer hair.

Actually, never mind. They're the same.

A very common clique is the Music-lovers clique. They hum a lot and carry stylish bags, which presumably contain easels and pan flutes. They've heard of bands that you haven't, so they are smarter than you.

Another important clique is the Cyborgs clique. They spend most of their time trying to appear as though they are normal humans. You can't even really tell that they're Cyborgs. There is some debate as to whether or not the Cyborgs clique exists.

The Invisibles clique. Like Cyborgs, only with funny pranks.

The Untouchables. The lowest group in the caste system. Spit on them. No, really. It's OK.

The People-who-stand-next-to-my-locker clique is composed of teens who love bumping into others and closing doors. The People-who-cut-in-the-lunch-line clique is full of short, talkative girls. The People-who-write-on-the-bathroom-stalls clique consists mostly of poets.

The School Disrupters clique membership includes the streaker, the bomb threat caller-inner and the aforementioned toilet poets.

The point is, with all of these cliques, people are excluding others and missing out on being friends with new people. Why can't we all ignore our differences and just be friends? Wars get started because of cliques. Like the America clique vs. the Terrorists clique. Come on now people, don't exclude. That's a hateful attitude!

I just rhymed that when I said it. That should help you not forget it.