The Hazelwood Standard and the Effects of Legal Censorship on High School Journalism

By Mercadees Hempel

COMM 440-01: Communication Law Research Paper

University of Indianapolis

The Supreme Court ruled in 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School
District ruled that students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or
expression at the schoolhouse gate. (Kozlowski, 2016) While this standard is still held in some
regard, the standard when it came to schools publications such as the yearbook and newspaper
changed with the 1987 Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier.
The Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District case all began when
three middle schoolers wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War when they went to
school. Siblings Mary Beth and John Tinker and fellow student Christopher Eckhart were
suspended for wearing the black armbands because it was inappropriate attire for school.
(Tinker v. Des Moines, n.d.) The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the
children, saying that the students did not intend to spark violence, destruction, damage or
criminal activity and that their protest was peaceful, so the school could not restrict their First
Amendment rights. (Tinker v. Des Moines, n.d.)
The Tinker ruling set the standard that students do not lose their First Amendment rights
once they entered school grounds, but the Hazelwood ruling gave school administrators the right
to censor their school publications. Several years later, there is still an outcry from high school
journalists about censorship, and researchers are analyzing the effects of the ruling and the
culture it has created.
The Hazelwood ruling took place in 1987 and concerned the school-funded student
newspaper Spectrum from Missouris Hazelwood East High School. Principal Robert Eugene
Reynolds had always reviewed the paper before its publication, and on May 13, 1983, he ordered
two articles to be cut from the issue. One of the articles featured three anonymous pregnant
students while the other one focused on students with divorced parents. Reynolds felt that there

was not enough anonymity for the students that were pregnant and that the article about divorce
was not fair to the parents. (Harrison & Gilbert, 1997)
Cathy Kuhlmeier and other staff members sued Reynolds, the journalism teacher, and the
Hazelwood School District. (Harrison & Gilbert, 1997) On October 13, 1987, the Supreme Court
made their decision, ruling that educators do not offend students First Amendment rights by
controlling the content and style of school-sponsored activities so long as their actions are
reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns. (Phillips, 1994) In other words,
principals and other school officials had the power to censor the high school publications.
Student Press Law Center explains that forms of censorship could be defined as prior
review of content, limiting circulation, confiscating papers, or suspending editors. Censorship
may also include reducing funding. (Lyons, 2011)
There are three categories a censored article could fall into according to the Hazelwood
ruling. One category is potential topic sensitivity. The second category is speech that
associate the school with any position other than neutral on matters of political controversy, and
the third category is speech that is inconsistent with the schools educational mission. (Phillips,
1994) Some critics of these categories and the Hazelwood ruling say that the categories are too
broad and the definitions are too vague, and that any school official could make the case for any
kind of censorship. (Phillips, 1994)
Hazelwood is so dangerous because neither students nor principals understand what it
really says. It never clearly states what the parameters are, said Mike Heibstand of the D.C.
branch of the Student Press Law Center. (Phillips, 1994)

Executive Director of the Student Press Law Center Frank LoMonte said that articles that
deal with school matters are censored the most because it could be considered negative or
unflattering. (LoMonte, personal interview, November 20, 2016)
For instance, its very common for students to be forbidden from discussing anything
related to the removal of school employees, even where those removals have already been
discussed in the local professional media, LoMonte said. It's also quite commonplace for
schools to censor any discussion of themes touching on gender or sexuality, which would include
the range of topics from criticizing the adequacy of school sex education to informing students
about the availability of condoms to advocating for gender-neutral restrooms. Any story that
involves the discussion of mature subjects is a lightning rod for censorship, primarily not
because of the welfare of students but because principals dislike fielding calls from angry
parents. Coverage of any gender-related or sex-related issue is almost guaranteed to produce
complaints from parents who find such material inappropriate for a student publication, and it is
that fear of complaints that motivates a significant amount of school censorship. (LoMonte,
personal interview, November 20, 2016)
However, it is unlawful to censor material just because it might cast the school in a
negative light, and LoMonte said that this is also the weakest reason to give as well. (LoMonte,
personal interview, November 20, 2016)
Students rights activists and the school board associations say that the problem with the
Hazelwood ruling is that it gives school officials sweeping power to control student
expression. (Salomone, 1994)
At the time of when the Hazelwood ruling was first announced, many writers
commended it because they felt the standard it set mirrored how publishers for newspapers work

in the professional world since all newspapers have a publisher that decides what content to run,
what style to put it in, and how to execute it. The difference however is that the principal is first
and foremost a government appointed official, and therefore does not have the same standards as
a publication publisher at a professional newspaper. (Knight, 1988)
The Hazelwood decision only affects public schools however because the First
Amendment only protects against the actions of government officials and the Hazelwood case
only dealt with First Amendment rights. Therefore, private school students do not have the
same freedoms as public school students and are not affected by the ruling. They must rely on
the rules of the school and the state when it comes to protecting their free expression rights.
(The Hazelwood Decision and Student Press, n.d.) The First Amendment does not apply at
private schools, and publications can be censored or shut down by private universities without
any repercussions from the law or the courts. (Overbeck, Belmas, & Shepard, pg. 649) Unless
the government is funding the institution and its management, private school students do not
have a case usually when it comes to censorship. (Overbeck, Belmas, & Shepard, pg. 650) The
only time a case could rule in a students favor when it comes to censorship is when the school
fails to follow its own bylaws. (Overbeck, Belmas, & Shepard, pg. 650)
Some states have responded to Hazelwood by creating their own anti-Hazelwood laws,
such as California, Massachusetts, Kansas, Colorado, Arkansas, and Iowa. (Haynes, Chaltain,
Ferguson, Hudson, & Thomas, pg. 90). The state laws read differently from state to state, but in
general the laws provide more protection to student journalists and other expressions of speech
under the Tinker standard. (Hudson, pg. 33) In California for instance, schools cannot enforce
any rules that would violate the students First Amendment rights, including the rights of the
press and that free speech rights are subject to reasonable time, place, and manner regulations.

This law has been in place since 1977 (The First Amendment in Schools: Resource Guide:
Student Publications, 1999) and Massachusetts created its anti-Hazelwood law in 1988. (Haynes,
Chaltain, Ferguson, Hudson, & Thomas, pg. 90)
However, despite Californias law, in 2005, Bakersfield School District in California was
sued by a group of high school journalists after Principal Joe Gibson of East Bakersfield High
School called for an article about homosexual students be pulled. The students were shocked as
they had had a good relationship with the principal before and had published stories about teen
rape and virginity earlier in the year.
Gibson wanted to pull the article to be pulled because he feared that violence would
occur against the featured students due to their sexual orientations. Therefore, by law, Gibson
had the right to censor the article as he felt it incites students as to create a clear and present
danger.
The students argued that there was nothing that made them think that the students would
be harmed after the publication. They also said they had obtained written permission from the
sources and their parents if they were minors. (Associated Press, 2005)
The stories were published in October 2005, and the lawsuit continued with the students
wanting a policy change so that this would not occur again. The students were to go to trial in
September of 2006, but the school created a new publications policy that was more favorable to
the students and their publication before that date arrived. The students were reportedly
ecstatic about this policy. (Yeh, 2006)
Bakersfield is just one of many schools that went through this. The Student Press Law
Center received 548 requests for legal assistance in 1988, but in 1992, they had 1,384. (Phillips,

1994) High school principals reportedly began exercising their new powers under Hazelwood
right away.
A student reporter at Northrop High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana was forbidden to
publish an article about dishonest financial practices by the schools coach. The school admitted
the story was true, but the article was not allowed to run anyway. (Phillips, 1994) In Colorado, a
principal also censored an editorial by a student that was critical about the Hazelwood ruling.
(Phillips, 1994)
In Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the Fond du Lac High School Principal Jon Wiltzius pulled
an article dealing with rape culture. The editor-in-chief of the paper, Tanvi Kumar, said that what
bothered her about the decision was that the principal, who had made these decisions before, did
not have experience in journalism. (Rose, 2014)
Though Mr. Wiltzius is an extremely intelligent man, he is not a journalism expert, so
ultimately it is someone who is not an expert in journalism who is deciding what gets included in
our paper, she said. (Rose, 2014)
With principals who do not have journalism experience and with broad, ambiguous terms
in the rules, some students have figured out ways to get around the Hazelwood standard at their
schools. At Fauquier High School, a senior high school journalist named SaraRose Martin wrote
an article about a new drug technique called dabbing for the student newspaper The Falconer.
Principal Clarence Burton III thought the article was too mature and said it could not run. He
worried that students would be exposed to the technique through the article.
Superintendent David Jeck supported the decision as he worried that the article would
lead the students to wanting to try dabbing. Martin however claimed that a good portion of the

student body already knew about dabbing, and her article did not promote the habit. However,
many school administrators including Jeck did not know about dabbing before the article.
LoMonte said that this type of reasoning would mean that students could not cover a
variety of subjects such as drunk driving and STDs, although these topics are relevant to a high
school population.
Instead of publishing the article in the paper, Fauquier Now, an online-only news website
published it after the editor heard about the censorship. On March 23, the article was published
and within the first 10 days, 11,400 unique visitors had been recorded reading the article.
Martins school, for comparison, had 1,200 students.
Jeck admitted that the attempt to censor the article was in vain at the end of the day since
it was published online, but that did not mean that the school should stop overseeing the
publication. This situation illustrates how more schools and students have options when it comes
to publishing news than before when Hazelwood was first ruled.
The turn of events underscores the dilemma school administrators face while exerting
control over student media in the age of the Internet. And it highlights the tension that can arise
when school officials try to balance the concerns of parents and those of student journalists who
believe they have important stories to tell. (Balingit, 2015)
Some high school publications have figured out that if they declare their paper a public
forum then they are exonerated from the Hazelwood standard. In New Jersey in 1994, a case was
taken to court called Desilets v. Clearview Regional Board of Education. A student at his school
submitted reviews for the movies Mississippi Burnings and Rain Man. The school officials
ordered that the reviews could not be published because both of the movies were rated R. The
mother of the student sued the board of education after this.

The Supreme Court in this case found that there was no reason to censor the reviews as
they were not inappropriate and R-rated movies were discussed by teachers in classrooms. The
court also decided that public school curricular student newspapers that have not been
established as forums for student expression are subject to a lower level of First Amendment
protection than independent student expression or newspapers established (by policy or practice)
as forums for student expression. (Desilets v. Clearview Regional Board of Education, 1994)
In other words, if a high school publication is used as a public forum for the students, the
school cannot censor it. Even though by the end of trial, the court found that the newspaper in
this particular case was not a public forum, it still set a standard. (Desilets v. Clearview Regional
Board of Education, 1994)
A public forum is defined as a place that has, by tradition or practice, been held out for
general use by the public for speech-related purposes. (Haynes, Chaltain, Ferguson, Hudson, &
Thomas, pg. 87) There are three types of public forums. The first kind is a traditional or open
public forum, which is a place that has a tradition of freedom of expression. Examples of a
traditional or open public forum would be the parks because the only restrictions the government
can impose have to further government interest. (Haynes, Chaltain, Ferguson, Hudson, &
Thomas, pg. 87)
The second type of a public forum is the limited public forum, and this kind of forum is
reserved for certain groups or topics such as the theater. The government can limit the access and
the use of these forums, but they cannot restrict the expression unless it furthers government
interest. (Haynes, Chaltain, Ferguson, Hudson, & Thomas, pg. 87)

A closed public forum is the third type of public forum. This forum is usually not open to
the public. Examples of this forum would be prison or army, military, and navy bases. (Haynes,
Chaltain, Ferguson, Hudson, & Thomas, pg. 89)
If a school decides that they want to make the publication a public forum for students
ideas, the Tinker standard is what applies, which states that students have complete First
Amendment protection and rights. (Is it constitutional for school officials to censor a schoolsponsored publication, such as a newspaper or a yearbook?, 2016) In other words, the school
officials cannot censor the publication if it is a public forum.
However, it is not as simple as just declaring that a newspaper is a public forum as
students at Harrisonville High School found out. The student newspaper wanted to write an
article about the superintendents resignation, but Principal Andy Campbell said he had to see the
story before it ran, and if the students ran the story without his approval, the students would face
punishment. Campbell said it was his right as principal to demand this and said he feared that the
students would print rumors.
The paper here is mine to control, he said. (Bashioum, 2015)
On the school newspapers policy online, the paper is described as an open forum, which
would mean that the Tinker standard is applied. But according to the districts school board
policy, the publication is a school-sponsored one and a part of the curriculum. Therefore, it is not
completely a public forum. The Hazelwood standard then still applies. (Bashioum, 2015)
While the censorship of these articles and publications result in anger and hurt feelings
among the students, the editor-in-chief of one high school publication noticed a greater effect
among his staff. Matt Wynn of the student paper Register said that the principal of his high
school, Omaha Central High School, had a problem with an article that was about students using

methamphetamine and a story about a student linebacker who had been charged with assault by
his ex-girlfriend. The principal said the articles were hurting the schools reputation and made it
a rule that the Register office had to be closed with all the students out of it by 7 p.m. and the
adviser would have to meet with the principal before every issue to discuss the articles.
Wynn said that the staff is now self-censoring themselves in order to make sure the
newspaper is not taken away completely or ordered to stop running. Wynn said that while the
Register is still award winning and the staff is still striving to do investigative pieces, there has
been a chilling effect on the staff. (Wynn, 2002) The chilling effect, a legal term that has been
used in the U.S. since 1950, describes a situation where speech or conduct is suppressed by fear
of penalization at the interests of an individual or group. (Chilling Effect Law and Legal
Definition, n.d.)
I can almost say without a doubt that if a spring sports athlete beats up his girlfriend, it
will not be reported in the Register, he said. (Wynn, 2008)
The chilling effect is just one example of the unintended consequences of the Hazelwood
ruling. While empirical evidence cannot say for certain that censorship has risen since
Hazelwood, there are findings that support the idea that the chilling effect has. (Salomone, 1994)
Advisers have begun to steer their students away from covering controversial topics, and
60 percent of school newspapers are less likely to publish certain articles because of the fear of
censorship. Twenty-three percent of advisers out of 350 high school journalism advisers in the
nation said that their students were less likely to report on controversial matters before the
decision, and more than 17 percent said that the students were less likely to write opinion pieces
that criticized school policies. (Salomone, 1994) More than 41 percent of the advisers also said

10

that their students were beginning to accept the Hazelwood standard. (Salomone, 1994 &
Phillips, 1994)
Vincent F. Filak and Andrea Miller decided to conduct a study measuring the comfort
levels advisers had about publishing controversial stories and how they correlated with their
supervisors comfort levels. Their findings were described in their study The impact of selfcensorship on high school newspaper advisers comfort level regarding the publication of
controversial stories.
Filak and Miller predicted that adviser ratings on their self-censorship scale and the
perception they had of their principals comfort levels regarding the articles about sexual issues,
substance abuse, student misdeeds, religion, social issues, and administrative issues in the
student newspaper would predict how comfortable the adviser was with these articles being
published in the student newspaper as well. Eight hundred advisers from a list of 2,600 names in
the Quill and Scroll database were chosen for the study, and 122 surveys were completed. Filak
and Millers hypotheses were all supported by the results.
The results of this study indicate high school newspaper advisers shape their attitudes
regarding controversial material based on internal and external pressure, the study said. (Filak
& Miller, 2008)
R. Trager and D. Dickersons study found that freedom is often at the whim of those in
charge, not the law. (Filak & Miller) J. Dvorak said that advisers who thought the principals
were poor communicators felt that those principals would be more likely to censor the
publications or they would only allow positive news to run.

11

Filak and Miller felt that the study is distressing in a way because students learn from
their teachers and advisers and that if the adviser self-censors, then the student will learn how to
do so as well.
At the high school level, students are often allowed to create journalism in a meaningful
way for the first time. If this initial environment is restrictive, it is likely that fewer students will
seek stories that, while controversial, are important to their audience, the study says. (Filak &
Miller, 2008)
Besides the chilling effect, there has been an effect on who gets censored as well. A study
from the University of Kansas found that young female journalists are more likely to be censored
than young male journalists in high school. (New research finds female high school journalists
bear burden of censorship, 2016)
Instead of empowering girls and building up their confidence, journalism classrooms
appear to be one more setting where girls voices are disproportionately devalued and muted,
said Peter Bobkowski, one of the research team leaders. (New research finds female high school
journalists bear burden of censorship, 2016)
The study found that 41 percent of surveyed female students were told by a school
employee to not write about a topic in the student media while only 28 percent male said they
had been told the same thing by a school employee. (New research finds female high school
journalists bear burden of censorship, 2016) This can greatly affect their self-esteem, LoMonte
said. (New research finds female high school journalists bear burden of censorship, 2016)
Some advisers and journalists worry about student journalists who get their start in high
school. Robert P. Knight lists his concerns in his article High school journalism in the postHazelwood era. One of his concerns is that some students may become good journalists, but

12

they will reject journalism after dealing with the Hazelwood-type journalism in high school.
He fears that journalists in high school will think that censorship and prior review will be a daily
standard at a professional paper to the same degree that they are in high school, and that will turn
them off from the business. (Knight, 1988)
Another concern Knight has is that some high school journalists may accept the
Hazelwood philosophy and go onto college in pursuit of journalism. However, this could be a
problem because they will be timid on pursuing investigative pieces or covering articles that may
damage the reputation of the school. Knight said it would be the college journalism programs
responsibility of reshaping the ideology. (Knight, 1988)
Finally, public school students would not have a good, concrete, and accurate
understanding of the press in the U.S. Instead, they are being taught that prior review and
censorship of articles because they are controversial, sensitive, or make an institution look bad
are the norm. Again, Knights concern is not only would good potential journalists be led to other
careers because of their high school journalism experiences, but that the ones who would
continue would bring with them an ideology that goes against what the presss role in the United
States is, and this puts a burden on the college journalism programs. (Knight, 1988)
Knights concerns are related to many others worries. The biggest fear since the
Hazelwood ruling, even 30 years later, is that potential journalists are not getting the proper
training or the best education while living under this standard. Critics of the Hazelwood ruling
are concerned about the contradiction that it presents: Schools are in charge of educating students
about journalism, the practices of it, the ethics, the process, and the responsibilities the
journalists have. They are in charge of instilling in the students the idea of covering topics and

13

subject that their readership does not only want to know, but needs to know. However, the school
officials can also limit these experiences by imposing censorship and prior review. (Lyons, 2011)
For the student putting these newspapers together, censorship in some ways robs them
of part of their education, Jessica Lyons writes. Student reporters interested in pursuing
journalism professionally use the work on college newspapers to start getting more experience in
the field and learn the process of putting stories together.
If schools prevent them from doing this through censorship measures, this is hurting
their ability to get true journalism experience at the very institutions that are responsible for
educating them. (Lyons, 2011)
Tinker said that students do not give up their First Amendment rights just because they
are on school grounds. Hazelwood decided that because public schools are branches of the
government and school-sponsored publications are part of the curriculum, principals should have
the right to censor or review those publications to be sure that it is serving the student body and
furthering the education of the students.
Several journalists and students claim that the Hazelwood standard is in fact depriving
students of their education by making their journalism experiences limited. Either way, as of
today, the Hazelwood standard is in place and has to be dealt with. How students deal with it
though may very well depend on the day and age as public forums and news sites online
continue to grow.

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