http://www.splc.org/newsflash.asp?id=1772CALIFORNIA — A high school newspaper in Redding is facing the chopping block after students chose to publish a photo of a burning flag and an editorial about freedom of expression in the paper's last issue of the school year.
Shasta High School Principal Milan Woollard said the photo and editorial cemented his decision to eliminate the paper next school year, a decision he said he already was considering due to budget constraints, according to the Redding Record Searchlight, a local newspaper.
"The paper's done," Woollard told the Record Searchlight. "There is not going to be a school newspaper next year."
Woollard called the photo and editorial embarrassing. Shasta Union High School District Superintendent Mike Stuart, a Vietnam veteran, said he finds the photo and editorial offensive. But he said he understands the need for a school newspaper and is trying to find an alternate way to keep the paper at Shasta.
"It may not be print, we may do it online," Stuart told the Student Press Law Center. "We'll see if there's ways to do it without the cost."
California law prohibits censorship except for material that is obscene, libelous or likely to incite students to break laws or disrupt the school. State law also bars administrators from retaliation based on student speech.
"If the subject matter of paper was something they considered in their decision, then the entire decision is in violation of state law, no matter how many other reasons they may have considered," said Adam Goldstein, attorney advocate with the Student Press Law Center. "There is no legal protection for a 'little bit' of censorship, or a decision that is 'only slightly' in violation of student rights."
The editorial, written by Connor Kennedy, discussed freedom of expression, specifically flag burning.
"Those who would assume that the act of burning the flag is unpatriotic, could not be more mistaken," Kennedy wrote. "The day an American cannot burn the flag, the day he cannot denounce his country, is the day America is no longer free."
Kennedy, who graduated last week, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that he chose the topic because they had recently discussed flag burning in his American government class.
"I'm deeply saddened, and I find it terribly ironic a high school newspaper would be shut down for exercising free speech — particularly when the curriculum being taught was that this was free speech," Kennedy told the AP.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1989 case Texas v. Johnson that a demonstrator who burned an American flag could not be criminally prosecuted because his act was protected speech under the First Amendment.
Stuart said he found the editorial patronizing toward veterans and that although the ideas Kennedy referred to had merit under the First Amendment, he felt the article, and its timing, were self-indulgent.
"I would've felt better about it if it had run a month ago so the student who wrote it would have had to defend his editorial to the students and the community," Stuart said. "It's kind of like he stuck it to the school on the way out. "
