Illinois High School Defends Spiking of Report on Wayward Honor Students

(Nov. 20) - For the second time this year, school administrators have rebuked the award-winning student newspaper at a suburban Chicago high school named for free-speech champion, one-time journalist and former U.N. Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson.

The faculty review board at Stevenson High in Lincolnshire, Ill., killed Friday's edition of the Statesman over an article containing anonymous quotes from honor students admitting to smoking and drinking.

"The advisers gave the student editors an option of holding the article ... so it could be more thoroughly reported," the school said in a statement. "The students' preference, however, was to leave the front cover bare. As a result, a collaborative decision was made ... to delay the issue's publication until the questions about the article's sourcing could be resolved."

The Statesman's respected adviser, Barbara Thill, resigned in April after the administration imposed a prepublication review policy in the wake of controversial articles on students' hook-up habits. Thill, who continues to teach English at the school, advised the paper when it won a Pacemaker award from the National Scholastic Press Association in 2007. Earlier this month, she received the Courage in Student Journalism Award from the Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University.

"When (students) decide to publish controversial content, they do so because they believe their readership community needs to be aware of the information," Thill said in accepting the honor. "Administrators who censor such content or intimidate students from publishing such content in effect block student readers from receiving information and thereby discussing and using that information."

The Stevenson High flap is but one of several recent instances of administrative interference with high school newspapers, notes Candace Bowen, director of the Center for Scholastic Journalism.

Stow-Munroe Falls High School in northeast Ohio prevented student journalists from publishing a tribute to a suicide victim in September, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has threatened a lawsuit. Last month in Boonville, Mo., according to press reports, the principal at the town high school stopped distribution of some copies of The Pirate Press because that edition had not undergone the mandated prior review. Also in October, the principal at Timberland High School near St. Louis killed an issue of the student paper that included a story about getting a tattoo.

"Students learn more about the real world of journalism if they're able to make some decisions," said Bowen, who is also a past president of the Journalism Educators Association. "Many of these school administrators seem to think they know everything about journalism. Most don't."

Pam Selman, the editor of the Statesman, told the Chicago Tribune that she was ordered by the paper's review board not to publish the disputed article, in which two unnamed students in the National Honor Society admitted to drinking and smoking, both of which the society prohibits. The editor also said the board demanded to know the names of the students and threatened disciplinary action.

It was in protest of those decisions that the newspaper's staff submitted a blank front page to the review board.
The school's statement said that it discourages the use of anonymous sources and is bound to report illegal activities to parents and possibly law enforcement.

Saturday, Selman said in an e-mail that the paper would work with the administration to get the story published. "The Statesman looks forward to engaging in further discussions with school district officials in an effort to resolve this matter appropriately," she wrote.

Stevenson High is one of Illinois' largest public schools, with more than 4,000 students. The McLean County Museum of History pays tribute to the school's namesake with a Web site, Adlai Today.

"He valued honest expression and the right to free speech," the site proclaims, "and the right to free speech. ... As Illinois governor, he vetoed a bill requiring public employees and candidates to submit to loyalty oaths." It also celebrates Stevenson's opposition to the "witch hunts" of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with a quote from the 1952 presidential campaign: "Too often, sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism."

As the museum notes, Stevenson once worked for the Bloomington newspaper his family owned, the Daily Pantagraph. And while at Princeton University, he was editor of the student paper.