Author: Tom Eveslage

Students pay price for taking ethical stance

By Media

By TOM EVESLAGE / Imagine, a resident of your community complaining to the city council that her free-speech rights were violated when the local newspaper edited her letter to the editor. If that’s not preposterous enough, how likely is it that the council would pass an ordinance forbidding the newspaper from editing any further letters without first getting permission from the city council? These are just fairy tales, at least when the professional media are involved. But student journalists at Neshaminy High School in suburban Philadelphia are fighting just such an unprecedented battle. And unless “government” officials in that public school come to their senses soon, a judge will be asked to intercede.

25 years of stifled student press freedom deserves attention

By Media, ,

I remember sitting with others lucky enough to hear oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the fall of 1987. It was an important case about educating young citizens, and the first that the court heard dealing with a high school newspaper. I also knew it mattered because the student newspaper is the voice of many young citizens in our public schools. My mistake. This wasn’t about the court’s earlier mandate that schools foster citizenship education. The Supreme Court said that 18 years earlier in Tinker v. Des Moines, and lower courts echoed this for two decades. But this Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier case was not about educating free and responsible young journalists. It was about administrative authority. And power. And it obscured the Tinker assertion that students learn citizenship in part through practicing free and responsible speech in school.