News

TEXAS -- A six-year-old lawsuit against the Dallas Independent School District yielded a verdict April 1 when a Dallas County jury ruled against an education activist who sought access to the standardized test scores of anonymous, randomly selected students so that he could link them to individual teachers in an effort to rate the quality of district teachers.The jury issued a two-part verdict, saying the school records Russell Fish requested in 1997 did not contain information that directly identified individual students.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of a New Jersey student whose elementary school denied him permission to distribute religious-themed gifts to his classmates.

FLORIDA -- A eighth-grader is asking a federal court to rule that she can distribute anti-abortion literature to fellow students at a Fort Myers middle school after the school denied her and an anti-abortion group's request to distribute similar material in April 2003.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of a New Jersey student whose elementary school denied him permission to distribute religious-themed gifts to his classmates.

The Supreme Court's March 22 decision not to hear the case let stand a lower court's ruling that schools can regulate elementary school student's on-campus expression.

A high school student in New York who videotaped the aftermath of a school fight for a news report says a school security officer confiscated his tape and the school has refused to return it.

Ken Smalt, who was filming the incident for a news broadcast on a local cable access channel, said the administration told him that his tape was confiscated because he was infringing on students' rights by videotaping them.

Student journalists at three Iowa colleges claim they were the only media organizations denied access to President George W.

A former Indiana high school student is suing the Clark-Pleasant Community School Corporation for libel after the senior edition of a student newspaper allegedly published disparaging comments about her.

Heide Peek, who graduated from Whiteland Community High School in 2002, was given the "worst reputation" award in the May 2002 issue of Smoke Signals, the school's monthly student newspaper.

Colorado has become the second state to outlaw the theft of free newspapers.

The law, signed by Gov.

Student journalists at two private Pennsylvania universities came under fire this month after publishing April Fools' Day editions that offended their readers.

After a student newspaper at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh published its annual April Fools' Day edition, which included a cartoon depicting one character uttering a racial slur, university president Jared Cohon established a commission to review the content of the paper to determine whether the school should take disciplinary action against the newspaper staff.

Each year The Tartan publishes a spoof edition called The Natrat on April 1.

NEW YORK -- Editors of a student-run conservative magazine at Binghamton University have accused the student government president of stealing and throwing away at least 50 copies of the magazine, a crime he claims was justified.James Amberger, associate editor of The Binghamton Review, Binghamton University’s conservative monthly magazine, said he caught Jordan Peck throwing away a stack of magazines March 2.“He seemed to think that since they were left out, he could do whatever he pleased with them,” Amberger said.