School’s young journalists earn kudos for taking stand

My hat is off to the Har-Ber High School student journalists who spoke truth to power at the Springdale School District board meeting Tuesday night. School newspaper editor Halle Roberts and yearbook editor Madelyn Stout addressed the board in response to recent district actions, first ordering the removal of two HarBer Herald newspaper stories from its website and then allowing them to be reposted. These students are now concerned the district will institute a policy requiring all future stories in student publications be reviewed by a school administrator before being published, a practice known as prior review. The stories that prompted all this concerned several football players who were allowed to transfer from Har-Ber to Springdale High School last year. Whether those transfers were in line with district policy is in dispute.

The Arkansas Student Publications Act, passed by the legislature in 1995, gives students the right of expression, including expression in school-sponsored publications like those at HarBer. Miss Stout told the board that prior review runs counter to students’ journalistic integrity and isn’t how it works in the real world, according to a story in the Democrat Gazette. “Now we feel as if they have the audacity to say our work needs to be reviewed before it can be published,” Stout was quoted in the article.

But, some will say, that IS how it works in the real world. Professional journalists routinely have their work reviewed by editors and publishers before a story sees the light of day. But that position ignores one key fact: In states like Arkansas, student journalists are their own publishers and are responsible for their own editing. School officials represent the government in this context. In the same way that most of us don’t want city, county, state and federal officials censoring our free press, we shouldn’t want school district officials censoring students. Journalism teachers/advisers are responsible for teaching students the skills they need and for supervising them as they produce publications. It’s the advisers’ job to guide students in matters of law and ethics, but students are responsible to make the decisions.

So, way to go, Har-Ber High School journalists. Way to remind those in charge of your school administrators the truth about why we have student publications. As Miss Roberts told the board, “I thank you for giving us this experience because we have been taught there’s always going to be someone saying, ‘This is wrong, be quiet,’ when we know that we are right and we have learned to go at this in a professional light.”

RANDY HAMM

Bella Vista