Education Law

Sex in the Student Paper

What else are high-school kids going to write about, right?

So, no, student's as journalists don't have a right to, like, write about whatever they want. They are students ... not journalists (and, heads up Grady, journalists don't either because they work for companies like News Corp.).

The long standing rule here since Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (which had a pretty similar fact pattern with pregnant students) is that school's can regulate school sponsored speech on legitimate pedagogical grounds. Since the school publishes the paper, it gets to determine what's appropriate to put in it (in that way, I guess it sort of is like the Wall Street Journal). So, this time the school let it slide ... but since this story got on CNN ... I promise they won't next time.

h/t Scott McLeod - by the way, you should read his series of Des Moines Register posts ("does the Des Moines Register just print anything?"  ... just kidding Scott).

Full post as published by Edjurist on March 06, 2009 (boomark / email).