EDITORIAL – School censorship exceeds reason

The Bill of Rights has never fully protected high school students. While on school grounds,… The Bill of Rights has never fully protected high school students. While on school grounds, their lockers and cars can be searched. They can be subjected to drug tests. They do not have complete freedom of speech in what they wear or what they write.

Unfair as this may seem, these limits exist for a reason; in the interest of safeguarding their students, schools get an exemption from many of the restrictions placed on the federal government.

There comes a point, however, where school officials need to step back. Instead of censoring their students, they need to listen to them.

Recently, a Tennessee high school’s student newspaper published an issue containing an article on birth control and a photograph of an unnamed student’s tattoo. All 1,800 copies of the newspaper were pulled from teachers’ mailboxes before students could read them.

There are several things wrong with this seizure. Firstly, if an administration reserves the right to censor its student newspaper, it ought to do so before the issue goes to press. Not only is waiting until after a paper is finished to censor it a significant waste of money, but it gives students a false hope and has them work at something which the student body will never read.

Secondly, the school administrators – and administrators across the country – need to realize that not talking about something does not make it go away.

The article on birth control was informative, not salacious. It did not encourage students to have sex or be otherwise promiscuous. Instead, it provided success rates for various forms of contraception and informed students that it is available from doctors and the local health department.

Clearly, this is an issue that is relevant to the student body, and one that at least some students are already aware of – they chose to write about it. Pretending that premarital sex does not happen, by keeping it out of the school paper, is ridiculous and ineffective. Teens have access to information from multiple sources; hoping that they will not find out about sex or contraceptives if the topic is not discussed in school is foolish.

To justify the censorship, the superintendent cited a “responsibility to the public to do the right thing,” and said that 14-year olds read the paper. If he were to take a quick glance at the pop culture that almost every 14-year old is immersed in, though, he would realize that the idea of sex is not especially foreign to American teenagers.

Rather than tailor the student newspaper to the insecurities of parents and administrators, schools need to focus on addressing the insecurities and issues of their students.

In this case, the students felt contraception was an important issue for their classmates to be aware of; it is in the school’s best interests not to restrict this flow of information.