Student Censorship | Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier

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In episode 56 of Supreme Court Briefs, a principal doesn't let students publish stories about teen pregnancy and divorce in the high school newspaper.

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St. Louis, Missouri

May 10, 1983

Robert Reynolds, the principal at Hazelwood East High School, looks over the page proofs that were to be published for The Spectrum, the school-sponsored newspaper. The Spectrum was a student newspaper, published every three weeks as part of a Journalism II class. The class distributed around 4500 copies not only to other students, but also sold copies to community members. Hazelwood School District paid for most of the costs of producing the newspaper, however.

Normally, principal Reynolds would be excited to read each new issue. However, this time he found two of the articles in the upcoming issue inappropriate. One story was about teen pregnancy, and included interviews with students at Hazelwood East who had been pregnant. That said, the story used fake names for the girls. Reynolds thought that folks would still figure out who they were, though. Reynolds also thought the article’s references to sex and birth control were not appropriate for younger kids at the school to read about. The second article dealt with divorce, and also brought up personal things that might reveal embarrassing personal family matters involving the students interviewed for it.

Now, instead of giving the students who reported on and edited the story a chance to respond, Reynolds went ahead and cut out the stories from the issue, and in doing so had to omit seven articles from it. So instead of being a six-page issue, it was a four-page issue. The students only found out that the articles had been left out when the issue had been released on May 13.

The three students involved with the two articles were reporters Leslie Smart and Lee Ann Tippett, and the editor Cathy Kuhlmeier. As you could imagine, they were very upset the articles didn’t get published, especially since The Spectrum’s advisor, Robert Stergos, had previously approved them. Kuhlmeier, Smart, and Tippett all confronted Principal Reynolds about what he did. Reynolds told the girls that the stories were “inappropriate, personal, sensitive, and unsuitable.” Well they were certainly not cool with that explanation, and made copies of the deleted articles and distributed them to other students on school premises anyway. They were not punished for that, by the way.

Later, arguing that the school had violated their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech AND freedom of the press, Kuhlmeier, Smart, and Tippett sued the school district and got their case to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. The District Court agreed with Hazelwood, saying that because Hazelwood mostly paid for the newspaper, they could control what was in it. Kuhlmeier and the rest appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which reversed the lower court’s decision, saying that nope, the newspaper was a “public forum” that went beyond the walls of the school.

And wouldn’t you know it, this time Hazelwood appealed to the Supreme Court. It heard oral arguments on October 13, 1987. Yep, by this time the girls had long graduated from Hazelwood East High School. Still fighting, though. I like it.

#supremecourtbriefs #apgov #firstamendment