March 21 marked the sixth anniversary of Washington’s New Voices law, but a new investigation by the Student Press Law Center finds that many of the state’s school districts still do not have fully compliant student media policies required by the law.
The legislation, passed in 2018, protects high school and college student journalists’ rights, providing for student editorial control. It also protects student media advisers against termination and discipline in retaliation. The law also requires districts to adopt their own policies that reflect those rights, which SPLC has found is important to ensuring New Voices laws are robustly understood and implemented at the local level.
In February, SPLC reviewed the student media policies for 100 of Washington state’s 295 school districts. Among those reviewed, only two districts are in full compliance with the law and 16 districts do not have an applicable policy whatsoever.
The remaining 82 districts are missing the provision that protects student media advisers against termination or discipline, and 29 also have additional serious noncompliance issues with the statute.
Of those 29 school districts in “serious noncompliance,” we looked at their policies’ last revised or adopted dates. None of the policies have been updated since 2018, the year the Washington New Voices law went into effect, and as shown below, almost all of them were last updated prior to the law’s passage.
One of the biggest issues for nearly all school district policies that SPLC has identified so far is that they do not acknowledge that student media advisers are protected against termination or discipline. The protection for advisers is important because, otherwise, it may provide an avenue for schools to indirectly censor students through the punishment of their advisers. Furthermore, many of the school district policies in serious noncompliance simply have not been updated since 2018 when the Washington New Voices law was passed.
SPLC celebrates the sixth anniversary of Washington’s New Voices law and the tremendous progress it has made in providing protection for Washington student journalists, but we also recognize the continued work that needs to be done for better implementation of the law across all school districts.
Learn more about the state’s law in our Guide to Washington’s New Voices Act. SPLC also provides a School District Advocacy Toolkit and a model district policy to help students, advisers and administrators create or improve the student media policy in their school district. If you have questions about your district policy, you can contact the free SPLC Legal Hotline.
Cecilia Cho is law and policy intern at SPLC and a second-year student at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.