This page is here to clear up any potential problems that might be a result of the school district policy and the seeming violation of it at this web site.  Two court cases will be cited from and this site’s policy will be stated.

Note that I was referred to these court cases by the person in charge of the district web sites.  This is what I found.

Case 1: US Supreme Court - Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 US 260 (1998)

Argued 13 Oct. 1987, Decided 13 Jan. 1988.

Background

Respondents (Kuhlmeier), former high school students who were staff members of the school’s newspaper, filed suit in Fed. Dist. Court against petitioners (Hazelwood), the school district, and school officials, alleging that respondents’ First Amendment rights were violated by a deletion from a certain issue of the paper of two pages that included an article describing school students’ experiences with pregnancy and another article discussing the impact of divorce on students at the school.  The newspaper was written and edited by a journalism class, as part of the school’s curriculum.  The District Court held that no First Amendment violation had occured.  The Court of Appeals reversed.

The Issue

The question whether the First Amendment requires a school to tolerate particular student speech - the question that we addressed in Tinker (next case) - is different from the question whether the First Amendment requires a school to affirmatively to promote particular student speech.  The former question addresses educators’ ability to silence a student’s personal expression that happens to occur on school premises.  The latter question concerns educators’ authority that students, parents, and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school.  These activities may fairly be characterized as part of the school curriculum, whether or not they occur in a traditional classroom setting, so long as they are supervised by faculty members and designed to impart particular knowledge or skills to student participants and audiences.  --Footnote says: The distinction that we draw between speech that is sponsored by the school and speech that is not is fully consistent with Papish v. University of Missouri Board of Curators, 410 US 667 (1973) (per curiam), which involved an off-campus “underground” newspaper that school officials merely had allowed to be sold on a state university campus.

Case 2: US Supreme Court - Tinker v. Des Moines School Dist., 393 US 503 (1969)

Argued 12 Nov. 1968, Decided 24 Feb. 1969

Background

Petitioners (Tinker), three public school pupils in Des Moines, Iowa, were suspended from school for wearing black armbands to protest the Government’s policy in Vietnam.  They sought nominal damages and an injunction against a regulation that the respondents had promulgated banning the wearing of armbands.  The District Court dismissed the complaint on the ground that the regulation was within the Board’s power, despite the absence of any finding of substantial interference with the conduct of school activities.  The Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, affirmed by an equally divided court.

The Issue:

Held:

1.) In wearing armbands, the petitioners were quiet and passive.  They were not disruptive and did not impinge upon the rights of others.  In these circumstances, their conduct was within the protection of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth.

2.) First Amendment rights are available to teachers and students, subject to application in light of the special characteristics of the school environment.

3.) A prohibition against expression of opinion, without any evidence that the rule is necessary to avoid substantial interference with school discipline or the rights of others, is not permissible under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Also:

The District Court (below the Supreme Court) concluded that the action of the school authorities was reasonable because it was based upon their fear of a disturbance from the wearing of the armbands.  But, in our system, undifferentiated fear or apprehension of dusturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression. (Now, I was told by an unidentified yet very reliable source, that the reason we must go through the district server and not post pictures of people with names is a fear of problems arising by confirming identities or such that we could threaten the safety of some people, even though people looking for someone, say, in the witness protection program, would not look at a high school band web site.)

Citations

Case 1: Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier

Case 2: Tinker v. Des Moines

These links take you to the particular cases at FindLaw.com, a law search engine.