Guardians of Liberty by Linda Barrett Osborne

Author:Linda Barrett Osborne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc. (Ignition)
Published: 2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Tinker was not a case about press freedom for students. Nothing written was censored or punished. But press and speech are related, and both fall under the category of “expression,” which can also include actions like the wearing of armbands. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Tinker had an important influence on the way the law viewed a student’s right to support or protest controversial opinions in public schools.

In 1988, however, a case involving a student newspaper, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, modified that decision. The Supreme Court decided that students’ rights to a free press can be limited by their school officials. The justices based their decision on their idea of community values; in this case, that articles in a school newspaper were inappropriate or offensive for younger high school students to read. Their decision was still influencing judgments as of this printing.

In May 1983, students in a journalism class at Hazelwood East High School, near St. Louis, Missouri, were putting out the last issue of the school newspaper for the year. They included articles on teenage pregnancy and on the way divorce affected kids. The first featured the stories of Hazelwood East girls who had become pregnant; their real names were not used. The second included comments from a student who felt her father was to blame for the divorce. The faculty advisor who taught the journalism class approved the articles.

Cathy Kuhlmeier (left), Leanne Tippett (center), and Leslie Smart (right) challenged their high school principal’s decision to censor articles in their student newspaper. They are shown here two years later in an edition of the St. Louis Globe, which printed the censored articles. In Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the Supreme Court decided that school officials could censor material they thought inappropriate for students.

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