The Supreme Court gave public school officials Wednesday a broad right to censor school newspapers, theatrical productions and other school-sponsored activities the officials deem inappropriate for their audience.
Writing for the five-justice majority in one of the most closely watched cases of the court term, Justice Byron White said students participating in curriculum-based activities do not have the same 1st Amendment rights of a free press and free speech as adults have. Three justices dissented.
”We hold that educators do not offend the 1st Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns,” White said.
”A school need not tolerate speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission, even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school,” White wrote.
He said educators may exercise ”editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”
His opinion came in a case involving the censorship of articles on teenage pregnancy and on divorce that were prepared by students in a journalism class for publication in the Hazelwood East Spectrum, a student newspaper at the Hazelwood East High School in suburban St. Louis.
White said a school has the right to ”dissociate itself . . . not only from speech that would substantially interfere with its work or impinge upon the rights of other students but also from speech that is, for example, ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences.”
In making its censorship decision, White said, a school ”must be able”
to take into account ”the emotional maturity of the intended audience . . . on potentially sensitive topics, which might range from the existence of Santa Claus in an elementary school setting to the particulars of teenage sexual activity in a high school setting.”
School officials have the right to censor student speech that advocates
”conduct otherwise inconsistent with the shared values of a civilized social order” or associates ”the school with any position other than neutrality on matters of political controversy,” White said.
”Otherwise, the schools would be unduly constrained from fulfilling their role as a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment.”
The case involved articles on teenage pregnancy and divorce that were prepared by students in a journalism class for publication in the Hazelwood East Spectrum, a student newspaper at Hazelwood East High School in suburban St. Louis.
In a strongly worded dissent, Justice William Brennan said the rationale used by the majority to justify the school principal`s censorship of the newspaper could convert ”our public schools into enclaves of
totalitarianism.”
”. . . Instead of teaching children to respect the diversity of ideas that is fundamental to the American system and that our Constitution is a living reality, not parchment preserved under glass, the court today teaches youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes,” Brennan wrote.
”The young men and women of Hazelwood East expected a civics lesson, but not the one the court teaches them today,” Brennan said.
White was joined in the majority by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O`Connor, Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens. Joining Brennan in the dissent were Justices Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun.
The decision marked the first time the Supreme Court has commented on the degree of constitutional protection afforded student journalists. In a footnote, White said the court was taking no position at this time on whether the same restrictive principles apply to student journalism on the college and university levels.
The group also noted that the 1987 American Newspaper Publishers Association`s Quill and Scroll national writing award for in-depth reporting was given for a story that described a student`s account of the rape of her sister ”and would never have been published” if the reporter had been a student at Hazelwood East.
”The decision is very frightening in its implications,” said S. Mark Goodman, an attorney with the Student Press Law Center. ”Student newspapers are probably the only avenue that teenagers have for expressing their views. What the Supreme Court has done is to give school officials the opportunity to cut off that avenue.”
Leslie Smart, one of three students on the school newspaper`s staff who brought the lawsuit, said she was ”shocked” by the decision.
”There is no mention by our forefathers that the 1st Amendment applies only to those over the age of 18, but the Supreme Court has decided there is,” said Smart, now a senior studying political science at Washington University in St. Louis. ”With this decision, the court creates a balance that gives a high school principal the authority to pull anything he wants from a school newspaper.”
The controversy stems from the May 13, 1983, issue of the Spectrum. On May 10, Robert Stergos, instructor for the Journalism II class that produced the paper, submitted page proofs to the principal, Robert Eugene Reynolds.
Reynolds objected to two articles. One described the experiences with pregnancy of three Hazelwood East students. The second discussed the impact of divorce on students at the school.
Reynolds thought that even though the article on teen pregnancy did not identify the students, their anonymity was not adequately protected. The article did not contain graphic accounts of sexual activity but did deal with the girls` sexual histories and their experience with birth control.
”It was not unreasonable for the principal to have concluded that such frank talk was inappropriate in a school-sponsored publication distributed to 14-year-old freshmen and presumably taken home to be read by students` even younger brothers and sisters,” White wrote.
The article on divorce contained comments from one student, quoted by name, that were sharply critical of her father. The principal contended that the article was journalistically unfair because it did not give the parent an opportunity to defend himself.
Reynolds also said the imminent publication deadline made it difficult to revise the pregnancy and divorce stories and chose, instead, to withhold from publication two full pages that contained the controversial articles.
Because of that, the paper shrank to four pages from six and articles on teenage marriage, runaways, juvenile delinquents and a general article on teenage pregnancy also were deleted.
”We cannot reject as unreasonable Principal Reynolds` conclusion that neither the pregnancy article nor the divorce article was suitable for publication in Spectrum,” White wrote. ”Reynolds could reasonably have concluded that the students who had written and edited these articles had not sufficiently mastered portions of the Journalism II curriculum that pertained to the treatment of controversial issues and personal attacks, the need to protect the privacy of individuals whose most intimate concerns are to be revealed in the newspaper, and the legal, moral and ethical restrictions imposed upon journalists in a school community that includes adolescent subjects and readers.”
Brennan`s dissent acknowledged that the constitutional rights of public school students may not be equal to those of adults, but he said students ”do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
”Just as the public on the street corner must, in the interest of fostering enlightened opinion, tolerate speech that tempts the listener to throw the speaker off the street, public educators must accommodate some student expression even if it offends them or offers views or values that contradict those the school wishes to inculcate,” Brennan said.
Robert Baine, a St. Louis attorney who represented the school board, said the issue before the court was classroom control of the curriculum as adopted by the board of education.
”We are delighted that it`s over and delighted that we were successful,” said Robert Baine, a St. Louis attorney who represented the school board. Baine said the issue before the court was classroom control of the curriculum as adopted by the board of education.
”The principal and the teacher have the right to implement these policies. If there`s a disagreement over these policies, the proper place to resolve this is at the ballot box . . . not the courthouse,” he said.
Richard Schmidt, general counsel for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, said the decision means that students ”can be instructed about the 1st Amendment, but they will not be able to practice it until they get out of school.”
”It`s the school administration which objected to the articles, and that amounts to government censorship no matter how the court fashions it,” he said.
