Tag: Winter 2008-09

This spring, banners and signs will adorn campuses. Students will stand behind tables around campus, handing out fliers and trying to convince passersby that their candidate is the best for the job.

Hundreds of protesters were arrested in Denver, Colo., and St. Paul, Minn., during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, respectively, this fall. However, these mass arrests managed to snare student and professional reporters with the protesters.

April 1 is traditionally a day for practical jokes like changing your friend's MySpace picture, stuffing the toes of your sibling's shoes with socks or resetting your roommate's alarm clock to 5 a.m. Many high school and college newspapers also jump into the act, publishing an April Fools' Day issue to skewer school policies and poke fun at the news they cover seriously for the other 364 days of the year.

It was November 1965 when teenagers John Tinker and Chris Eckhardt were on a bus to Des Moines, Iowa, after participating in a protest against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. A discussion began about wearing black armbands to show disapproval of the conflict.

When Chris Lowry, Colton Dougan and Michael Joseph walked into their high school in Arkansas on Oct. 6, 2006, they did not expect to be filing a lawsuit against the school in federal court four days later.

As millions of high school and middle school students walked through the schoolhouse gate after summer vacation, many found their T-shirts were not so accepted by strict administrators and teachers.

Colin Moyer, 18, has no current plans to become a professional journalist but felt it was his civic duty to start his own independent newspaper at his high school.

The freedom of expression torch once carried by former editors at the Daily Tar Heel was passed to a new editor to ensure that the legacy of the 2005 freedom of expression agreement remains at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But after a new chancellor was named in 2008, the agreement had to be signed again.

This edition of the SPLC Report marks the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Tinker decision, in which the Court famously declared that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

Editors of the Eastern Progress, student newspaper for Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Ky., scored a victory for open records in an appeal to the Kentucky attorney general that challenged the university's redaction of information from campus police reports.