Student journalists aim to empower the student body by raising awareness of important events within and outside their school communities. Over-censoring school newspapers, as in preventing entire issues from being covered due to controversy and shunning negatively connotated commentary on society, suppresses journalists’ ability to share informative and thought-provoking stories with their peers. It also restricts respectful academic discussion of controversial issues and severely diminishes freedom of the press.

Extensively censoring school newspapers makes the point of student journalism irrelevant. Newspapers are meant to publish stories about current issues in politics and relevant controversies, and school newspapers should be able to do the same for students to read about.

“I think it would be actually very interesting to see what students have to say about real-world, controversial stuff. I guess it just brings more perspectives,” senior Annabella Luo said.

Not only is it the goal of newspapers to spread information about disputed issues, but according to Luo, it is what student readers would find intriguing and appreciate in their school’s newspaper.

To add, having controversial topics discussed in school newspapers will contribute to the academic learning environment of the campus. Student journalists seek to facilitate discussion with well-researched, unbiased and meaningful articles. This will not only serve to inform students of current events but also allow them to practice having respectful discussions and disagreements.

“If you censor [student journalism], then it doesn’t allow for students to be able to learn how to talk about certain topics. And it…also stunts their growth in that sense,” Luo said.

Luo suggests that censoring fewer topics and content in student newspapers could help students practice grappling with more complex and weighty ideas.

While schools may be concerned that students do not have the maturity to discuss such ideas reasonably and without bias, this is not the case. High school students are constantly building up their discussion and communication skills in their other classes.

“In English, we learned to write a lot and we do have debates and discuss controversial topics, so I think that we do have [enough] responsibility to write about such [controversial] topics,” junior and president of Curious Creators, a student journalism club, Aadhya Katara said.

This conveys that students do have the capacity to handle discussions about sensitive issues in respectful ways. More student journalism on controversial topics will help further this skill to write and talk about such issues, not cause harm to the school environment.

Another issue with over-censoring student newspapers is the lack of credible news sources available or known to students. Advanced Placement government teacher Christopher LePage highlights how school journalism has the potential to resolve this issue.

“It’s imperative that younger people are…getting their news from a cited story versus [from TikTok or Instagram]…And if we’re going to have a journalism program and a school newspaper, it makes sense to have– you know, is it just entertainment-based or are students looking to actually write meaningful articles?” LePage said.
Katara also touches on this problem and discusses how having more relevant, outside-of-school news topics covered in the Golden Arrow Newsmagazine would be helpful.

“I think it would be beneficial because, again, me personally, I get a lot of my news from like TikTok [and] Instagram, which [are biased],” Katara said.

The misinformation and bias that social media widely spreads about current events extends beyond the students at Woodridge High. According to Pew Research Center in a 2024 survey, 44% of TikTok’s regular news consumers, 37% of YouTube’s regular news consumers and 32% of Instagram’s regular news consumers are high schoolers or younger.

In addition to the alarming amount of young students being consumers of news on social media, news sources monetizing their content makes reliable news hard to come by for students. The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post all have paywalls. Further, the Orange County Register only gives more access to news stories for subscribed viewers.

If school newspapers and student journalists were able to have more autonomy in deciding what stories to write, there would be more financially accessible and reliable news for students to read.

Unfortunately, with concerns about how students or their parents would feel about school newspapers’ takes on controversial issues, school administration tends to not risk any possible discomfort of readers.

“I think just overall, we like to be kind of offended by a lot of things…I think censorship is kind of a way that if any article or any topic could possibly result in [administrators] having to answer questions from a member of the community or a student not feeling welcome at school…they’re just going to nix and censor every single story that can cause them to possibly deal with any sort of complaint,” LePage said.

The extreme reduction of freedom of the press is a large price to pay to ensure that every reader does not get offended and student writing does not create any disruption in the school community. However, this decision has been made before in the case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, when it was ruled that the school district had the right to prevent the school newspaper from publishing articles they deemed ‘inappropriate.’

According to Oyez’s description of the case, “Educators did not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the content of student speech so long as their actions were ‘reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.’”

However, the mention of ‘pedagogical concerns’ is vague and doesn’t make clear to what extent school districts should be able to censor school newspapers or student journalists’ freedom of speech.

Over-censoring school newspapers is a reflection of the tendency to want to avoid disagreement. However, this severely limits students’ ability to converse about disagreements and expand one’s way of thinking to add to the intellectual environment of high school.

“[Student journalists’] speech is limited by or offset by people’s ability to maybe become uncomfortable. And I think that is an overall problem in our society,” LePage said.

With the increase of polarized politics and the unhealthy trend of being stuck in echo chambers, individuals are more afraid to put their opinions out there and discuss things that could potentially cause offense. Extensive censorship of school newspapers just conforms to this problematic behavior.

Furthermore, in the case Tinker v. Des Moines, the court ruled that students could wear armbands to protest the Vietnam War at school and that they were not obligated to leave their political beliefs at the schoolhouse gate.

According to Oyez’s case summary, “In order to justify the suppression of speech, the school officials must be able to prove that the conduct in question would ‘materially and substantially interfere’ with the operation of the school.”
This ruling leaves the question of whether publishing controversial issues in the student newspaper would actually interfere with the operation of the school, and as a result, if student newspapers truly do need to be censored. The answer to that question is no.

Over-censorship of school newspapers traps student journalists in the confines of what they should and shouldn’t write. It stops student journalism from reaching its full potential–being a forum for students to pose questions about important issues in our society and communicate relevant information for a more informed student body.