Arkansas Student Publications Act: Implementation and Effects

Abstract

In April 1995, the governor of Arkansas signed into law the Arkansas Student PublicationsAct(A.C.A. 6-18-1201 etseq.), making Arkansas the sixth state legally to formulate public school students' journalistic rights and responsibilities. California, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, and Massachusetts had previously incorporated some form of student press law into their state codes. The Arkansas law requires school officials in each school district, in consultation with journalism advisers in that district, to create a written student publications policy for the district. This approach was taken because those who formulated the law and lobbied for its approval by the Arkansas General Assembly felt it was an effective way to move all or some control of the student press from school administrators to journalism advisers. The approach differs significantly from the nearly absolutist approaches taken by student press rights supporters in 29 other jurisdictions where passage of student press legislation has been attempted; prior to the September 1997 gubernatorial veto of student press legislation in Illinois, these attempts had resulted in 23 failures and five successes (Plopper, 1996). Each policy must identify the freedoms of and limitations on the student press in that particular school district. The law also stipulates that a distribution policy must be established in each school district. Review of literature State and local policies governing student press rights have been the subject of much discussion since the 1960s, but there was a renewed interest in such policies following the U.S. Supreme Court's School District v. Kuhlmeier (1988) decision. The Court's opinion enhanced the potential for administrative control over student press rights by recognizing that administrators in public schools, for legitimate pedagogical reasons, could censor school-sponsored student publications that had not been designated as public forums (484 U.S. 260, at 273). Dickson (1997) reviewed various post-Hazelwood state and national studies that asked principals, advisers, and students about administrative control and student self-censorship. He found overwhelming support for the premise that there was no Hazelwood effect, i.e., that there had been neither a significant increase in administrative control over the public high school student press since the Hazelawood ruling nor a significant increase in student self-censorship since that ruling. He also found, however, that pre-Hazelwood studies of the high school press indicated a high degree of restrictions on student journalists. Additionally, Dickson's own study found little support for a relationship between student press censorship and the existence of state policy restricting such censorship, although he did find that advisers in states with student press laws, compared to their counterparts in states without press laws, were less likely to agree that advisers were ultimately resp onsible for the content of student newspapers (p. 11). Indeed, student press laws may not have much effect on student press censorship. Since 1988, in the states with statutory protections for the student press, there have been reports of administrative censorship and attempts at censorship that have conflicted with such protections. For example, in Massachusetts in 1989, high school newspapers were confiscated and two student editors were reassigned after they published a satirical editorial that compared teachers to Communist leaders and implied that the school's superintendent had used LSD(Journalists suffer, 1990). In 1991, school administrators in Council Bluffs, Iowa, who were unaware of Iowa's statute protecting student journalists, banned from the school newspaper an editorial that criticized the school's head basketball coach (Free press law, 1991). The administrators then threatened to suspend three students who distributed the editorial at a school basketball game. …