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Mich. principal censors investigative story and editorial on lawsuit facing school
'Factual errors' cited as reason to pull story about resident's claim that school bus fumes caused cancer
April 9, 2002
MICHIGAN — Student journalists at Utica High School are fuming after their principal censored their award-winning school newspaper's coverage of a highly publicized pending lawsuit involving allegations that the school district's bus depot causes health problems for area residents.
Principal Richard Machesky forced the Arrow staff to remove a front-page story written for the March 15 issue of the paper about a lawsuit the school faces from a resident claiming school bus exhaust fumes caused his lung cancer. Machesky also objected to an editorial and accompanying cartoon that suggested the bus depot should be moved from its current location, which is near an elementary school, playing fields and a neighborhood.
"The Arrow is a school-sponsored, curriculum-based publication, over which the school exercises a great deal of control," Machesky wrote in a letter to the staff. He said he chose to withhold the items due to "factual errors," and Superintendent Joan Sergent supported his decision.
Utica administrators declined to comment about the incident, but said in letters to the students that they did not think their actions constituted censorship, since they do not see the Arrow as an open public forum.
The day the issue was set to go to press, March 7, the Arrow staff replaced the controversial article with a story titled "Welders compete at regionals." They replaced the pulled editorial with one that attacked censorship and outlined freedom of speech, accompanied by a large black box in which the word "Censored" appeared.
Julie Wojciechowski, the Arrow's senior managing editor, said the staff was "upset and confused" over the pulled article.
Katy Dean, the author of the article, has vowed to sue the school if necessary and is currently looking for legal representation.
The rest of the Arrow staff is determined to get real answers from the administration as to why the story was pulled, Wojciechowski said.
"We just want reasons as to why our story was censored, because we don't really have any rights now," she said. "So, we're going to go down and we're going be investigators and reporters, who we've been trained to be."
"One of the most important freedoms Americans have is freedom of the press," reads an editorial Wojciechowski and other staff members wrote. "Papers around the world are censored for trying to cover important issues. The struggle to protect our freedoms does not begin in Afghanistan, but right here in our classrooms. We must fight for our freedoms at home as well as abroad."
The editorial refers to the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier saying, "Schools have the right to censor in specific instances, but only where it interferes with their 'pedagogical functions.' While [Hazelwood] does apply in some cases, it is not a blanket right to use in all instances. The high school newspaper should not be a public relations tool of the district."
The Macomb Daily ran all of the material Machesky pulled from the Arrow on April 7, unedited.
"A lot of the teachers have been telling me that if [the
administration] hadn't censored the story, they would have been
better off, because in reality it's a student newspaper,"
Wojciechowski said. "You would have had maybe 200 students
read the newspaper, 50 parents, and just let it go. They were
apparently concerned with their image, and now they destroyed
it even more by letting it get to the big paper."
© 2002 Student Press Law Center
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For More Information: Read the Arrow's censored story and editorial, printed in the Macomb Daily on April 7.
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