High school journalists and advisers in Colorado are relieved.
They managed to insert a provision into a bill exempting some student journalists from a requirement that school officials receive permission from students' parents before administering any surveys or assessments.
The original version of the bill did not contain an exception for student journalists.
WISCONSIN -- A federal district court will have the opportunity to determine if the referendum system at the University of Wisconsin -- which allows the student body to determine funding for certain student groups -- is constitutional.
Although the Supreme Court upheld the use of mandatory student activity fees to fund campus groups in March with its decision in Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Schools with information regarding registered sex offenders present on their campuses will be required to make that information available to students if the Senate approves a bill passed unanimously by the House in July.
If the federal bill becomes law, beginning in 2001 campus police departments will have to make available the same kind of sex offender registry information as local law enforcement would.
KANSAS -- Completing course work may not be enough to attend graduation ceremonies at Schlagle High School in Kansas City.
Mary Colston was ejected from her graduation ceremony in May after a dispute with administrators over an honor cord she was wearing that signified her membership in Quill and Scroll, the national honor society for student journalists.
Colston said school officials told her she could not wear the cord because only students who were members of the National Honor Society are allowed to wear their cords.
NEW JERSEY -- The student newspaper staff at William Paterson University may be facing a difficult fall semester if university President Arnold Speert sticks to a promise he made last spring.
Speert said he would no longer recognize The Beacon as the campus newspaper after being offended by the paper's annual satire edition, The Bacon, which was published in May.
In a memo sent to the university community, Speert said he was "appalled and offended by the insensitivity and poor judgment" of the newspaper staff in publishing material that he called racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemetic and "antithetical to the values that are at the heart of this University."
Speert also said his administration would no longer advertise with the paper or grant interviews to its reporters.
He further threatened to make The Beacon's other advertisers aware of the school's condemnation of the paper and to discourage them from advertising with the publication in the future.
OHIO -- Ohio University student Nathan Ray will return to campus this fall after settling a lawsuit in which he accused the school of violating his rights to due process during a campus disciplinary procedure.
The Department of Education is currently suing two other public universities in Ohio to prevent them from releasing campus disciplinary records to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Some critics of campus courts say the secrecy in disciplinary proceedings can lead to charges that the system is unfair.
Ray was suspended in April after a campus court found him guilty of violating the student code of conduct.
VIRGINIA -- A slightly increasing minority of Americans support free-press rights for high school students, according to a recent survey.
In The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center's survey, "The State of the First Amendment 2000," released in early July, respondents were asked whether they believe high school students should be allowed to report on controversial issues without the approval of school authorities.
Forty-three percent strongly or mildly agreed that students should have the right to cover hard-hitting stories.
Prospective students visiting a university's campus for the first time are supposed to get their first glimpse of what life as a college student is really like.
Those who attended Drew University's 'Spring Saturday' admissions event on April 15 may have received a tour of the campus, but their opportunity to get a true feel for the student voices of the university was taken away -- along with 1,000 copies of the student newspaper.
Co-editor Susan Rella said her staff filed a criminal mischief complaint with local police after the campus public safety department failed to act on reports that witnesses saw students wearing admissions and tour guide T-shirts removing stacks of newspapers from The Acorn's main distribution sites in the school's dining hall and student center.
Rella estimates that half of the paper's 2,000 press run was stolen but that most of those papers were later found in an area of the student center that is inaccessible to students.
The issue that was stolen contained front-page articles on sexual assault and two arson arrests.
NEW YORK -- What started out as a routine story idea led to a lawsuit filed by the former editor of the Hudson Valley College student newspaper.
Tony Gray claims officials from Hudson's Faculty-Student Association, which operates the school's bookstore, are violating the state's Freedom of Information Law by denying The Hudsonian access to invoices for textbooks the store sold to students.
The paper first sought the records in January for inclusion in a story examining bookstore prices and whether the store is overcharging students by inflating book prices.
MASSACHUSETTS -- An eighth-grade student was suspended and subsequently expelled in May for drawing a picture of his school surrounded by explosives.
Michael Demers, a special needs student at Northwest School in Worcester, was asked by a teacher to draw a picture of how he felt after being reprimanded for talking in class.