Since 1984, the Student Press Law Center has recognized student journalists who show exceptional determination and support for student press freedom. Ahead of announcing our newest honorees, SPLC reached out to a few former award winners to see where they are now.
For this profile, former SPLC intern Julia Gentin spoke with the former editor-in-chief of the Wooster High School Blade in honor of the publication’s 2004 Courage in Student Journalism Award.
While few student journalists may recognize Draudt v. Wooster, they owe a lot to the students behind the influential case about the rights of student media.
The 2003 decision laid the framework for how student journalists can gain greater protections from censorship, establishing what Student Press Law Center senior legal counsel Mike Hiestand called an “awesome precedent” that future cases would build on.
More than 20 years after winning SPLC’s Courage in Student Journalism Award for pursuing the case and standing up for student press freedom, Darcie Draudt-Véjares reflected on the invaluable role SPLC played in supporting her, the impact the story had on her career path and the importance of journalism in developing important life skills.
The story: underage drinking
In 2002, Draudt-Véjares was editor-in-chief for the award-winning Wooster Blade at Wooster High School in Ohio when the staff wrote an article analyzing whether their administration consistently enforced the school’s policy on punishing student-athletes for underage drinking.
One of the students quoted in the story admitted to drinking alcohol at an off-campus party, and the Blade reported that she would be disciplined for underage drinking. But school officials said she had repeatedly denied to them that she was drinking — and therefore was not punished.
Believing the accusation of underage drinking was “potentially defamatory” against that student, administrators confiscated all 4,500 copies of the newspaper before it was distributed. The Blade journalists, however, maintained that the student had told a reporter that she had been drinking.
Draudt-Véjares and three co-editors — Vasanth Ananth, Tim Yaczo and Kendra Oyer — decided to sue their school to force the release of the issue.
When it was initially censored, Draudt-Véjares and her co-editors published an issue with an empty box where the story would’ve gone.
“We had a school policy of no prior review, which means that we have full discretion over our editorial content,” Draudt-Véjares said. “School administration did not have the right, according to this policy, to intervene, except for some pretty extreme cases…we were trying to pursue our rights as student journalists in line with First Amendment civil liberties.”
Ultimately, a U.S. District Court decided that Wooster administrators could censor the article at issue. In doing so, however, it was the first federal court to lay out limitations to Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, the landmark 1988 Supreme Court case that created a First Amendment carve-out for student journalists and permitted administrators broad discretion to censor them.
For Wooster, because the school had opened up the newspaper as a “limited public forum” — as determined by nine criteria established in this case — Hazelwood did not apply. Instead, the judge used the Tinker v. Des Moines standard, which sets a much higher bar for when administrators can censor student speech.
“[The case] put us through a level of scrutiny that definitely taught me the importance of getting facts straight, being conscious of how you talk about events, as well as how government institutions work,” Draudt-Véjares said. “Going through that definitely gave me a different insight into how and whether I’d want to be a writer in the future.”
Following the court’s decision, the students and the school district agreed to a settlement. The board of education paid $35,000 — for the students’ legal fees and to charity — and agreed to avoid confiscating the paper in the future without first talking with the student editors. But most importantly, the Draudt case emphasized that Hazelwood, a loss for student journalists, was not a blanket precedent.
“I have a vivid memory sitting in my dorm room in my freshman hall, on the phone, talking about the case,” Draudt-Véjares said. “That’s when we decided to accept the settlement, and that’s when we learned about these criteria that Judge Gwin set out.”
Draudt was immediately influential, as another federal court cited the case the following year in rejecting censorship of a student newspaper in Michigan. That case, Dean v. Utica, is still regularly cited today as an important decision for student press rights.
SPLC’s ‘invaluable’ aid
In a town of 30,000 in the middle of Ohio’s farmland, The Blade staff did not have a lot of connections to lawyers and journalists.
That’s where the Student Press Law Center came in. Draudt-Véjares remembers her initial consultation with Hiestand, who helped her determine if the case had “legs to stand on.”
SPLC paired the students with a pro bono lawyer and was an asset throughout the legal process.
“SPLC helped empower us to protect our rights, and clarify what rights we had,” Draudt-Véjares said. “Those kinds of institutions and experienced, expert lawyers giving their time pro bono is pretty incredible. And it was invaluable.”
A through line to today
Initially, because of Draudt-Véjares’ love for writing, she wanted to become a journalist. And after the lawsuit, she even thought about taking the media law path.
She ended up instead as a political scientist working in foreign affairs.
“Your career only makes sense in reverse…I write nonfiction. I write about politics. It requires a similar amount of fact-checking, interviewing and managing publications,” Draudt-Véjares said. “I see now kind of a through line to my initial interest in being a writer to today.”
Even for careers that are not as clearly associated with journalism, Draudt-Véjares said that the skills from student media are transferable, from writing precisely to capture the reader’s attention, to interpersonal connections.
“At the end of the day, our world is a social place. Getting access to information or access to people all depends on relationships,” Draudt-Véjares said. “That requires a lot of empathy that serves any student journalist, any journalist, any worker well, especially in this day and age.”