Does The First Amendment Protect The Freedom of Speech for Students?

            The Bill of Rights guarantees imperative rights for all the people of the United States, yet the Supreme Court limits some of the freedoms depending on the circumstances.  Although the First Amendment protects the freedom of the press, school officials should be able to censor student newspapers because schools do not have to accept speech that does not have the same opinion as the mission of the school.  In Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the Supreme Court ruled that the censorship of the student newspaper, The Spectrum, was not a violation of the First Amendment because the newspaper was not considered a public forum, the principal’s concerns were reasonable, and the student speech did not follow the school’s educational mission.

            Using the skills they learned in the previous journalism class, students in the Journalism II class wrote articles for The Spectrum, the school newspaper, as part of the school curriculum.  The principal of the school, Reynolds, always reviewed the articles before the publication of the newspaper.  The newspaper contained articles written about controversial topics that did not agree with the school’s educational mission.  Because he thought there was no time to revise and edit the articles, the principal decided to delete the two pages in which the articles appeared on.  The students found out about the deletion only when the newspaper was printed and distributed.  Kuhlmeier and two other on the staff of the newspaper sued the school district and the principal for violating their First Amendment rights by deleting the two pages.

            The Supreme Court did not consider the student newspaper as a public forum, allowing the school’s officials to censor the newspaper.  The Supreme Court defined a public forum as a place “where the government has less leeway to regulate speech than in others” (62).  The definition created the limited public forum, which is “a place with a more limited history of expressive activity, usually only for certain groups or topics” (“Public Forum”).  Any form of expression that is school-sponsored is not a public forum because the school faculty members supervise the action.  An activity is considered a public forum is only “when school officials have ‘by policy or practice’ opened a publication for unrestricted use by students” (“Student Press”).  The Supreme Court defines school-sponsored expression as any activity overseen by faculty members that expresses ideas in which people associated with the school do in any place and is designed to teach a lesson to the audience or to have participants use skills (63).  Because the faculty members supervised and kept some control over the content of school newspaper, The Spectrum was not considered a public forum.  According to Justice White, school officials are allowed to “impose reasonable restrictions on the speech of students, teachers, and other members of the school community” when the institution is not considered a public forum (Hazelwood School District).  Therefore, the censorship of the newspaper was allowed because the newspaper was considered a limited public forum.