On Wednesday, November 2, the Seattle school board introduced a plan to give high-school principals new, sweeping authority to censor student newspapers. By Thursday, journalism students in Ballard, Capitol Hill, and elsewhere were peppering their neighborhoods with flyers, and organizing students and parents online to block the administrative censorship.
As 17-year-old Kate Clark, editor-in-chief of the 94-year-old Ballard High School Talisman, explains it: “If this rule passes, we wouldn’t be able to criticize school policy… It would be up to our principal to decide what we could and couldn’t print. He could take away 80 percent of our content.”
Specifically, the rule change would allow officials to ban “publications or oral speeches which criticize school officials” or encourage school boycotts or other “substantial disruptions” including, bizarrely, “widespread shouting” and “boisterous conduct.” In other words, student newspapers couldn’t report news that engages with students—makes them upset, joyous, organized, or overtly political.
School board member Harium Martin-Morris, who drafted the proposed policy, insists that it’s necessary because the district currently has “no policy that addresses libel or freedom of expression.” (He’s wrong—current district policy allows students to “express their personal opinions” as long as they don’t engage in “personal attacks or publish libelous or obscene material.”)
But Clark and her managing editor, 18-year-old Katie Kennedy, argue that the proposed rule essentially muzzles students’ ability to critically review their school and its policies, such as earlier school start times (which the paper criticized last issue). “Next issue, we’ve got an article that debates skipping class versus being tardy to class,” explains Kennedy. “If I were to advise skipping class, we could be punished.” Or, more likely, the article simply wouldn’t run. Such policies censoring student newspapers already exist in neighboring cities like Puyallup.
Adults are coming to their side. On November 4, education blogger Melissa Westbrook wrote on the Save Seattle Schools blog (www
.saveseattleschools.blogspot.com), “Parents should pay attention to these rapidly changing policies.” Westbrook started an online petition pressuring the board to veto the policy change, garnering 206 signatures in two days. The Stranger also pulled its election endorsement of Martin-Morris in light of his controversial proposal. (Election results weren’t yet posted when the paper went to press.)
Under the mounting criticism, the Seattle School District announced on November 7 that it is deferring Martin-Morris’s proposal until 2012 “to ensure that it better reflects the community’s values,” according to a district statement—which doesn’t make this a battle won so much as rescheduled. 
The School District, and Director Martin-Morris in particular, are not evil; they are merely lazy and incompetent – Director Martin-Morris in particular.
Director Martin-Morris did not intend to strip students of their freedom of the press. He was going to do it un-intentionally.
The Board is in the process of completely revising the entire body of Policies. They are re-doing them to more closely resemble the ones recommended by the state association of school board directors. They are repealing some, revising some, and adopting some new ones. That’s all fine. They are making these revisions to dozens of policies all at once. That’s fine too.
The problem is that the members of the Board, Director Martin-Morris in particular, are too lazy to actually review all of the new policies that they are adopting, review all of the changes they are making, or review all of the policies they repealing. This careless, willy-nilly process has brought us the predictable result.
The Board already inadvertently repealed the policy that required them to introduce motions at one meeting and vote on them at a subsequent meeting. Now we see that they were about to inadvertently strip students of their freedom of the press.
Who knows what other surprises are hidden in the dozens of policies that the board will adopt on December 7. The Board certainly doesn’t know.
This is exactly the sort of sloppy, lazy, inattentive work that this Board, and Director Martin-Morris in particular, has done for the past four years. This is an excellent example of the reasons that informed people wanted to replace them, Director Martin-Morris in particular, in the recent election.