Washington Votes Forum

Discipline and control are necessary to create a school learning environment. Remove them and you have chaos. We pay our educators big bucks to teach and supervise our children but this Senator wants to tie their hands behind their backs. Regulating what high school students say and print is totally appropriate and should remain that way.         

 Please Senators find something useful to do instead of grandstanding legislation redundant to the existing constitution.

 I hope they are concerned about keep our freedom of speach as well.

Amen!  The students are there to learn, among other things, propriety, which many don't get at home.  We're talking about minors, and need to educate them in the best ways we have learned.

This legislation is in fact not redundant to the current state and national constitution. This is a similar bill to one that has appeared the last several years that would grand students the same free speech in a student forum publication as working newspapers. 

The Supreme Court (on a national level) has established 2 distinct standards for judging whether student free speech can be censored. The first, from Tinker v. Des Moines, says that students have the right to free speech as long as the speech does not represent a material disruption to the school. This was in the late 1960's, but in the 80's things changed with the Hazelwood decision allowing school sponsored media to be censored for a list of things including being "ungrammatical". This does not allow blanket prior restraint, but opens the door for school officials to censor further. The unfortunate recent trend in the Supreme Court is to limit the rights of student journalists and infringes on the rights of students to free expression. 

This bill but protecting even school sponsored media will bring the legal standard from Hazelwood back to Tinker and allow students to exercise their right to free speech. Other states, most notably Oregon, have passed similar legislation to protect student journalists. 

This is not redundant to the current state constitution and provides student journalists with the most important tool: right to free speech. I applaud the state legislator with taking on First Amendment protection even for those high school journalists who cannot yet vote.