Katherine Poston, Reporter and Designer
On March 21, Governor Jay Inslee signed Senate Bill 5064 into law. The law will be put into effect June 7 of this year, and will prevent public high schools from censoring material and advertisement content in student publications.
In order to fully understand this bill, it is necessary to look back to the 1987 – 88 Supreme Court case, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier. In this case, the court decided that the First Amendment does not protect all types of student speech, and that schools retained the right to withhold speech that was “inconsistent with ‘the shared values of a civilized social order.’”
In other words, schools had the ability to exercise prior restraint, in which the administration can not only review, but also remove and censor material prior to publication.
The Hazelwood case restricted the rights of students as decided upon in the 1968 decision of Tinker v. Des Moines, in which the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech still applied to school campuses.
Thirteen other states have written laws which effectively overturn Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier.
Washington’s S.B. 5046 states, “Student editors at public high schools are responsible for determining the news, opinion, feature, and advertising content of student media.”
Additionally, the bill protects the advisers of such publications from being disciplined in any way due to a failure to suppress any content in question.
Some restrictions on publications do apply, as student editors must follow the ethical and legal guidelines of professional journalism.