Quill - December 2008 - (Page 24) Educators By Cynthia Mitchell Educating the There’s a new push to aim First Amendment educational efforts at high school principals and administrators. The rationale: If school leaders aren’t convinced of the value of incorporating the First Amendment into their school cultures, journalism teachers and media advisers will likely always find themselves locked in battle with their bosses. “If you have administrators who understand the First Amendment, they’re less likely to do prior review and prior restraint,” said Logan Aimone, who was a high school newspaper and yearbook adviser for 10 years before becoming executive director last year of the National Scholastic Press Association. “So rather than teach the teachers, it makes sense just to get to the principals in the first place.” Longtime First Amendment educator Sam Chaltain has funding from the Knight Foundation and the McCormick Tribune Foundation for two weeklong leadership academies that will each train 45 school administrators. (The enrollment, 45, is designed to match the 45 words of the First Amendment.) 24 Quill DECEMBER 2008 Ball State University’s J-Ideas program has a partnership with the university’s Teacher’s College to offer administrators an online graduate course, “The School Administrator and the First Amendment,” and is holding workshops for teams of advisers, students and principals. The Journalism Education Association’s Scholastic Press Rights Commission is embarking on a fledgling effort to reach principals. And Kent State University’s new Center for Scholastic Journalism is also looking for ways to reach administrators. Meanwhile, journalism advisers across the country are making their own inroads. “We absolutely have to explore every avenue we have,” said Carrie Faust, a journalism adviser at Smoky Hill High School who recently conducted a presentation and discussion on student press rights for 25 new principals and assistant principals in her school district in Aurora, Colo. “While a full frontal assault is really important at the national level …We need to do it where we live. Sometimes one school at a time and one principal at a time is the way to go. Every time we get an advocate, it goes out exponentially.” They’ve got their work cut out for them. Only a quarter of principals recently surveyed by the Knight Foundation thought that student media should be able to publish freely. And principals who want to censor have had the law on their side since 1988’s Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier decision. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for principals to engage in prior review and censorship if the newspaper was school sponsored and if it related to a “legitimate pedagogical concern.” Seven states have since passed laws that protect their high school press. Otherwise, the path around the decision is to establish the newspaper as a public forum, either by policy or practice. If that’s the case, then administrators must prove their censorship is based on a reasonable forecast of “substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities” or an invasion of the rights of others.
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