Private schools avoid press freedom laws: Catholic student journalists often censored

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 13, 1996 by John L. Allen, Jr.

Facing a financial crisis in the late 1980's, Rockhurst High School, a Jesuit college prep school in Kansas City, decided to terminate seven teachers. The administration wanted to keep their identities secret. The editors of Rockhurst's student newspaper, however, felt it was important to put a human face on the dollars-and-cents details of financial restructuring.

With the consent of six of the seven teachers, the Prep News published their names, their reactions to being terminated and their anxieties about the future. The article helped readers appreciate the human cost of budget cuts.

During the 1995-96 school year, at Bishop Alemany High School in Woodland Hills, Calif., the editors of the Tribal Tribune also wanted to help readers understand the personal dimension of an important story. In the spring, several students were suspended, and a few later expelled, for membership in a dance crew. A dance crew is a group of people who perform choreographed routines at parties and compete against other crews. Some crews have been known to have links to gangs.

Tribune staffers wanted to question the policy that said membership in a dance crew was grounds for automatic expulsion. They also wanted to point out that membership in a dance crew did not necessarily mean membership in a gang and that several crew members were honors students with no prior disciplinary record and no evidence of gang affiliation. The story never saw the light of day.

The difference between those two stories illustrates a fundamental difference in approach to free expression issues at Catholic high schools, a topic that surfaced recently in informal discussions during a national gathering of high school journalists.

At Rockhurst, the school has a policy of free expression for its student journalists, so the article about the teachers ran without any interference. At Alemany, no such policy exists. The administration killed the Tribune's coverage. No article, no picture, no editorial ever ran, despite abundant coverage of the situation in the local press.

According to faculty advisers and students across the country, Alemany's decision to censor its newspaper is, by far, more representative of the situation in Catholic schools. Since most free expression laws do not apply to private institutions, students often find themselves struggling for basic free press rights. What's at stake in this struggle, according to student media advocates, is not only educational quality but also the community spirit Catholic schools trumpet as one of the most important qualities distinguishing them from the public system.

Part of the reason censorship is so prevalent in Catholic schools is the absence of any legal impediment to it. Public school administrators are government officials, so the First Amendment offers newspapers under their jurisdiction some protection.

The 1988 Supreme Court decision of Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier did give principals greater authority to control student publications, but the ruling stipulates that censorship must be "reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns."

Many state constitutions provide even greater protection, and some states, such as California, have adopted laws providing for the freedom of the student press.

Catholic student journalists, however, benefit little from this body of law. Federal and state statutes do not provide similar prosections at private schools. Moreover, the First Amendment does not apply, since private schools are under the law of contracts rather than constitutional law. Consequently, unless a private school specifically promises in its student handbook to provide free expression, it is under no obligation to do so.

Since most Catholic schools have no such policy, they are free to censor as much as they want. All the evidence suggests censorship is a very common practice. "There are a lot of Catholic Catholic schools -- too many -- whose administrations believe that the journalism program is basically a public relations tool" said Mark Bubalo, faculty adviser at Rockhurst.

Aimee Busquet, adviser for the Vincam, the student newspaper at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in Miami, echoes the sentiment. "We can print anything we want, as long as it doesn't make the school look bad," she said. "That's the sad reality."

As a case in point, Busquet referred to Belen's decision last year to perform a series of random drug tests, leading to the expulsion of a student who tested positive. "We couldn't cover it ... none of that could be mentioned in our paper at all. If it's there, why couldn't we talk about it? It was not mentioned, as if it never happened," she said.

At a recent gathering of 4,500 student journalists at the National Scholastic Press Association/Journalism Education Association convention in Chicago, Catholic school students and advisers shared similar stories of intimidation by school officials, a lack of support for student publication programs and outright censorship of student media.