At a Missouri high school, the student
editors of a school newspaper sued the school district when
the principal cut out two of their newspaper articles
without their knowledge. The editors claimed this was
censorship and a violation of their First Amendment right to
free speech. The articles the principal removed were
personal stories written by students at the school. One was
about divorce in which the student strongly criticized her
father. The other article was about a teen pregnancy and
described experiences with sex and birth control. The
principal said he removed the article about divorce because
the girl's father did not have a fair chance to respond. He
removed the second article because he said he was worried
that references to sexual activity were inappropriate for
younger students and that the privacy rights of the students
described in the article might be violated.
In Court...Lawyers for the students argued that
the newspaper was a "public forum." Both students and
community members could purchase it. They said the principal
should only be able to cut out articles that would disrupt
the school and neither of these two would have done so.
Lawyers for the school district said that the sale of the
newspaper only paid for a small part of the publishing
costs, and that the school district paid for the rest ... as
well as other costs involved in teaching the journalism
class. Therefore, they argued that the district is the
"publisher" and has the final say on the content of the
paper, just like adult newspapers which are controlled by
their publishers.