CITING BOTH the First Amendment and California’s student free expression law, a national press rights and free speech group has called for a Marin County school district to stop what its superintendent recently called an “open and ongoing” investigation of how student journalists chose to publish a photograph that drew complaints.
The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, told officials of the Tamalpais Union High School District on Monday to back off from the award-winning student newspaper Redwood Bark of Redwood High School in Larkspur.
EdSource reported last week that administrators appeared to violate a state law protecting student publications from interference and censorship.
A spokesman for the group said it is not representing students in any potential litigation, but is “doing public advocacy on their behalf.”
“Administrators would rather soothe the hurt feelings of third parties than stand by the important work of their student journalists,” Marie McMullan, an attorney for FIRE, said in a statement. “Fortunately, the First Amendment and California law compel the district to uphold student press freedom.”
The controversy with The Bark began in February when it published a photo of student protesters in San Francisco holding a banner that said “Students Against” in large letters, followed by a list of issues, including “Zionism.”
The district received multiple complaints about the newspaper publishing the words “against Zionism,” calling the phrase offensive to supporters of Israel.
District Superintendent Courtney Goode told EdSource in an interview late last month that he had no choice but to ask a law firm to investigate how the photo was chosen, saying students have a right to attend classes in an environment free of discrimination and harassment. The Bark’s then adviser, Erin Schneider, was notified of the investigation on March 4. She later went on an unpaid leave of absence, telling parents and students in a letter that she’d encountered “significant resistance” to doing her job.
The progress of the law firm’s work is unclear. Goode told EdSource by email Thursday morning that the “review does not limit student editorial decision-making or student press rights.”
But legal experts have said making student journalists explain their deliberative process of what to publish violates free speech rights and would have an obvious chilling effect on their journalism.
“The Bark simply reported on a newsworthy event by publishing an image of what participants actually displayed. That is routine journalism,” McMullan wrote in a letter to Goode.
“Treating this sort of editorial judgment as ‘harassment’ would deter student journalists from covering anything controversial if it is even tangentially related to a protected characteristic like race or ethnicity,” McMullan wrote. The photo “bears no resemblance to the kind of student expression that loses constitutional protection by rising to the level of discriminatory harassment.”
FIRE also criticized Goode for ordering The Bark to take down an Instagram post about references to Marin County found in the U.S. Justice Department files concerning the late financier and sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The post referenced a woman who is apparently a French National as “providing models” to Epstein. She threatened to sue this district if her name was not removed. Under pressure from Goode to censor the post, the students took it down but later restored it.
Legal experts said Goode had no authority under California law to order the censuring of the Instagram post. Goode told EdSource last month that he was trying to protect the district from a lawsuit, but that he had not conducted any legal analysis of the woman’s threats before his order to censor. A lawyer at the Student Press Law Center told the students that because their reporting was limited to what was contained in the investigative document released by the federal government, the woman’s threat of a lawsuit was baseless.
The situation at The Bark is the subject of this week’s EdSource Education Beat podcast.
This story originally appeared in EdSource.
