Faces of Liberty: Students Fight Against Censorship of School Newspaper
"[I]t can hardly be argued that...students... shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate..."
- U.S. Supreme Court in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. (1969).
Tigard High School Senior Scott Barcik and a few friends hit on the idea of producing an off-campus student newspaper.
"I thought it would be a way to get out the opinions of people in school who wouldn't normally speak out...I got the whole idea from computer bulletin boards. It would allow people to express their views anonymously."
Barcik and his friends called their paper Low-Spots, a play on the name of the school's official student newspaper, Hi-Spots. It was written, produced and distributed off campus. But copies inexorably turned up at school —circulated by other students, not the publishers.
As Barcik recalls:
"It wasn't more than an hour or so after the first copies were passed out that I got a little note saying I was to visit the principal. He told me that the paper was inappropriate and unacceptable, that he wanted to see me with my mother later in the day."
Low-Spots articles irreverently addressed—with a mild scattering of profanity—a variety of school issues from a perceived fixation on sports to the merits of abolishing the grading system. One bitingly accused the school administration of misusing its power. Barcik and Tom Jansen, who also was involved with the paper, were told they were being suspended for seven days for disrupting the educational process.
"Mr. Kubiaczyk, the principal, just kept going on and on about how offensive the language was when my mother and I went to see him."
Shannon Kasten, editor-in-chief of Hi-Spots, judged one of the best high school publications in the country that year (1992) by Columbia University, decided along with her co-editors that the paper should speak out in support of Low-Spots in an editorial.
Kasten remembers:
"The school administration had made lots of decisions over the three years I was there that seemed pretty oppressive. They didn't really seem to be in touch with students. And I think that produced animosity."
Beset by recent incidents of on-campus violence and concerned about further provocation, school officials reacted negatively when they heard about the proposed editorial. Kubiaczyk told Hi-Spots editors either to revise it or pull it from the paper. The editorial was pulled.
Said Kasten:
"They said our publishing the editorial was going to put ideas in students' heads. It seemed like a really superficial reason to not let our paper publish support for an underground paper which was providing an outlet for students to maybe get some of their aggression out at how they were being treated."
A few days later the school district rescinded a long-standing policy of trusting student journalists to determine, within broad guidelines, the content of student publications. New regulations were adopted requiring that "all publications distributed to the student body or in school have administrative approval." From then on, Hi-Spots was subject to prior review.
Said Kasten:
"When they decided to interfere with the publication of Hi-Spots, it was sort of a last straw type of thing...We were just really fired up. We couldn't believe that it happened."
With the support of the ACLU, Barcik, Kasten and their student colleagues sued the school district.
A Washington County circuit court judge decided school authorities had, indeed, acted unconstitutionally by censoring the Hi-Spots editorial and punishing Barcik and Jansen. But the district's prior review policy was allowed to stand.
The students appealed. The appellate court, in a ruling later upheld by the Oregon Supreme Court, said that issue was moot since the students had graduated and the policy no longer affected them. But the damages the students suffered due to the violation of their constitutional rights were not moot, the high court declared, and the appeals court erred in dismissing them. The lower court subsequently affirmed the students' claims for retrospective relief.
Photographer: Brian Foulkes
Writer: Harry Lenhart