Principal Alan Weiss decided to pull the plug on an ad for contraception and Planned Parenthood services just before the Wireless went to press on November 10 because of several parent complaints, he says. He contacted the school paper's adviser, Andrea Milstead, after parents raised the issue that the young woman in the ad looked "too happy." (The had has been running in the school paper for at least two years.)
"Parents were concerned about the double meaning embedded in the ad," says Weiss. "The woman is jumping up in the air, giving the idea of freedom, and sending a message of promiscuity."
Weiss misses the point. Teens are going to have sex regardless of Planned Parenthood ads. What teens need are messages about responsibility. In 1982, only 48 percent of teen girls used contraception the first time they had sex; by 1995 that number had jumped to 76 percent because of access to contraception, according to a study cited by the National Resource Center for Women and Families. As a result, teen pregnancy rates sharply declined in the 1990s.
"Everybody was kind of ticked, but I was outraged," says Wireless news editor, Jason Baxter, a junior.
Weiss says he told Milstead to contact Planned Parenthood about using an ad without an image, but she wasn't able to get one in time, so Milstead agreed to remove the ad from the November issue.
To Baxter, Weiss' decision seemed to indicate new policy for the paper from here on out. They would have to find an alternative Planned Parenthood ad (no "promiscuous" happy girl)--or forget about running Planned Parenthood ads ever again. Savvy Baxter, 16, contacted local media regarding the story, and "it freaked [school administrators] out," he says.
Principal Weiss now says that the time between the November and December issues of The Wireless was a "cooling off period," and that some version of a Planned Parenthood ad (but not the controversial one) will run next month. But Baxter says he has been told that if the paper can't find an alternative to the "promiscuous" happy girl, they can run it.
Weiss cites the upheaval surrounding the ad as election-year sensitivity, and says he wouldn't want to take a position to censor the students. "I didn't think the decision was disrupting the learning environment," Weiss says.
The students are still attempting to make the school reimburse them the $45 they lost from the removal of the advertisement.
