January 29th is National Student Press Freedom Day, set aside to highlight their achievements and the importance of allowing student journalists the full protection of the First Amendment. Since the landmark Hazelwood decision, student journalists have been subject to increasing…
Tag: hazelwood
CA Teacher Stands Up for Students Despite Threat of Dismissal
After almost three decades of helping students put together the high school newspaper, a CA teacher is facing possible termination for standing up for her students’ First Amendment rights. It all began in April, when Kathi Duffel received a letter…
50 Years After Tinker, Erosion is Evident
In recent months, free speech within schools has come to the forefront as districts abandoned their own policies for reviewing educational materials; efforts to ban books have increased; and, in one instance, a student was arrested after refusing to recite the pledge of…
Support Students’ First Amendment Rights
The Student Press Law Center (SPLC), the Freedom Forum Institute, and the Newseum in Washington, DC, have banded together to declare that 2019, the 50th Anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Tinker decision, the Year of the Student Journalist. With a…
VA Rejects Bill Protecting Students’ First Amendment Rights
The Virginia legislature rejected HB 2382, a bill protecting the First Amendment rights of student journalists, on Monday after the House Education Subcommittee produced a tie vote. The bill was written to return K – 12 and public colleges and…
CBLDF & Kids’ Right to Read Project Fight for Beartown in NC
This week CBLDF, as a co-sponsor of Kids’ Right to Read Project, along with National Coalition Against Censorship and other groups dedicated to protecting the First Amendment rights of readers, wrote a letter imploring North Carolina Rockingham School District to…
Vermont Students Stand Up for Their First Amendment Rights!
Burlington High School students had the opportunity to sit down recently with administration and discuss developing new guidelines to preempt censoring student journalists in the future. This meeting came after the school newspaper, BHS Register, was censored in September for breaking…
A Closer Look at Precedent in Recent City of Thieves Book Ban
By Brian Saucier Regular readers of the CBLDF news blog will recall that the Lee County School District in Fort Myers, Florida recently ordered its 10th grade students to stop reading City of Thieves by David Benioff after a parent…
Indiana Fails to Restore Student’s First Amendment Rights
Indiana’s House Bill 1016, which sought to reinstate student journalists First Amendment rights, failed 47 – 45, missing by four votes the constitutional majority required to pass it to the Senate. This outcome closely echoes the hollow victory of a…