The Student Press Law Center and two national
journalism organizations filed a
friend-of-the-court brief today urging a
federal appeals court to overturn a ruling that upheld the censorship of a
cartoon that was critical of a New York high school's teaching methods for
sex education.
The SPLC, joined by the Journalism Education
Association and National Scholastic Press Association, filed the amicus brief in
the Second U.S. Court of Appeals supporting the former Ithaca High School
students' First Amendment right to publish the cartoon. The case, R.O.,
et al., v. Ithaca City School District, has been ongoing since
2005.
The cartoon parodied a health class that is a
mandatory for all students. The cartoon, a satirical commentary about the
school's sex education curriculum, shows a woman standing at a chalkboard
and barely discernible stick figures in various sexual positions. The cartoon
would have accompanied an article that was published which examined the
school's sex education teaching methods, including the use of comical
skits that promoted abstinence.
The school administration censored the cartoon in two
publications -- the official campus newspaper, The Tattler, and a
student-funded independent newspaper, The March Issue.
"If the Court tells the students of Ithaca
High School that they had no legally protected right to satirize the
ineffectiveness of a school policy -- the effectiveness of which the school
itself is telling this Court is a matter of life and death -- then the
'chill' of intimidation that student
journalists already feel when they bravely take up a critical pen against their
elders will turn into a deep freeze," the brief states.
The brief was prepared and filed on behalf of the
SPLC, JEA and NSPA by Joseph P. Esposito, Thomas C. Goodhue, Ian Conner and
Dennis Gucciardo of Hunton & Williams in Washington, D.C., one of the
nation's leading media-law and litigation firms with 18 offices throughout
the United States, Europe and Asia.
"It sends a strong message that the SPLC, the
JEA and the NSPA came together to sound the alarm that this case goes far beyond
the issue of one political cartoon. The district court's approach
dangerously expands the ability of school administrators to censor speech
critical of their policies, even if the speech is created on students'
off-hours and not subsidized by the school at all," said attorney Frank D.
LoMonte, executive director of the SPLC.
LoMonte said the district court erroneously relied on
two Supreme Court precedents that do not apply to The Tattler or The
March Issue. The first case, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier
(1988), applies only to school-funded curricular publications, while both The
Tattler and The March Issue were extracurricular. The second case,
Morse v. Frederick (2007), applies only to speech encouraging illegal
drug use, not to criticism of school policies. "The effect of the district
court's ruling is to say that schools can suppress any speech by labeling
it 'harmful.' That's not the law, and the Second Circuit needs
to say so unequivocally," LoMonte said.
Since 1974, the Student Press Law Center has been
devoted to educating high school and college journalists about the rights and
responsibilities embodied in the First Amendment, and supporting the student
news media in covering important issues free from censorship. The Center
provides free information and educational materials for student journalists and
their teachers on a wide variety of legal topics.
The JEA is an organization of nearly 2,600 high school
journalism teachers and advisers who teach reporting and journalistic skills to
the nation's scholastic journalists. The NSPA is a nonprofit educational
association that provides journalism education services to students, teachers,
media advisers and others throughout the United States.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Frank LoMonte,Esq.
703.807.1904, x121
director@splc.org
