“New California law protects school journalism advisors. The act, said to be the nation’s most stringent, prohibits school administrators from retaliating against advisors for trying to protect student press freedoms.”

According to the article by Robert Lopez, over the last three years 15 teachers at the high school level were fired, transferred, or otherwise retaliated against for allowing their students to publish articles that were critical of the school administration. 

This really tickles me for a few reasons. First, we librarians L-O-V-E love that “free speech thing.” Basic standards and beliefs of this profession hold that information should be available and freely accessed by anyone and everyone. We fight censorship as mightily as we keep food and drinks away from our books. I can think of no better time to begin instilling this value in the next generation than in these formative teen years. 

But on a more serious note, I profoundly believe in the competence of a teacher to know what’s appropriate for her students, and in the underlying freedom from being pushed around by the higher-ups for doing so. No school is perfect, but frantically trying to pretend like students have done something horrible because they focused a critical eye and gave a different opinion, especially in a journalistic context (Isn’t that the point of it, after all?) makes us look a little silly. Schools are public facilities, and since I am a taxpayer and all that, I applaud the opportunity able to get a student’s perspective on what’s happening just about any public campus. 

Read the text of the new law here: Senate Bill 1370: Protection for Journalism Teachers