Hazelwood V Kuhlmeier Hazelwood v.

Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier

Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier

The United States Supreme Court 1988 case of Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier concerned First Amendment rights and censorship. Former high students filed suit in Federal District Court against the school district and school officials claiming that their First Amendment rights were violated by the deletion from an issue of the school newspaper two pages that included an article describing pregnant students' experiences and another article discussing the impact of divorce on students at the school (Hazelwood pp). The principal felt the pregnancy article was inappropriate for younger students and objected to the divorce article because it identified a student who complained about her father's behavior (Hazelwood pp). The principal felt that the student's parents should be given the opportunity to respond or consent, thus, believing there was no time to make changes before publication, he withheld the pages even though there were other unobjectionable articles included on the same pages (Hazelwood pp). The District Court held that no First Amendment violation had occurred, but the Court of Appeals reversed (Hazelwood pp).

The case concerned the extent to which educators may exercise editorial control over the contents of a high school newspaper produced as part of the school's journalism curriculum (Hazelwood pp). The U.S. Supreme Court held that the Respondents' First Amendment rights were not violated (Hazelwood pp).

According to the decision, "the First Amendment rights of students in public schools are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other setting, and must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment (Hazelwood pp). A school is not obliged to tolerate student speech if it is inconsistent with the school's basic educational mission, even if the government could not censor similar speech outside the school (Hazelwood pp). The school newspaper here is not a forum for public expression, because to be deemed as a public forum, school authorities must by policy or by practice open the facilities for indiscriminate use by the general public or by some segment of the public, however, if not public forum has been created then school officials may impose reasonable restrictions on speech of students, teachers, and other members of the school community (Hazelwood pp). The school officials in this case did not deviate from their policy, for the newspaper was part of the educational curriculum and a regular classroom activity under the teacher's control for every aspect of publication (Hazelwood pp). The officials did not show any intent to allow indiscriminate use by student reporters, editors, or other students, and so were entitled to regulate the paper's contents in any reasonable manner (Hazelwood pp). The standard for determining when a school may punish student expression that occurs on school premises is not the standard for determining when a school may refuse to "lend its name and resources to the dissemination of student expression" (Hazelwood pp). Thus, educators are not offending First Amendment rights by exercising editorial control over the "style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns," and in this case the school principal acted reasonably in requiring the deletion of the pregnancy article, the divorce article and the other articles that appeared on the same pages (Hazelwood pp). The principal acted from the need to protect the privacy of those students whose intimate concerns were to be revealed in the newspaper, and "the legal, moral, and ethical restrictions imposed upon journalists within a school community" that includes adolescent subjects and readers (Hazelwood pp). Moreover, the principal's decision to delete two pages from the newspaper rather than deleting only on the offending articles or require modification, was reasonable under the circumstances as he understood them (Hazelwood pp).