Education leaders facing the crosswinds of political pressure and community scrutiny should tread carefully in their response to student journalism about controversial issues, experts say.
If leaders attempt to censor what students plan to publish, they not only detract from the educational experience but potentially put the school or district in legal jeopardy. And the information is likely to come to light elsewhere, anyway.
“A newspaper is not a public relations arm of the school or the district,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that advocates for student journalists’ free speech rights.
“Too often, these school leaders … see some of the work student journalists do as inconvenient, or embarrassing, or controversial,” said Hiestand. “Instead of stepping up to support that work and give them the resources they need to do that work well and do it accurately, oftentimes, the first instinct is to suppress it.”
When students are writing about controversial or difficult topics — whether in their newspaper, yearbook or a school broadcast program — it’s not usually because they are trying to press adults’ buttons, said Andrea Negri, scholastic press rights director at the Journalism Education Association and a journalism and yearbook teacher at Cypress Woods High School in Texas.
“They’re doing it because it’s a concern for their audience,” she said.
For example, students in Negri’s class preparing their final newspaper issue of the year wrote about a Texas proposal that would include Biblical references and stories in a required reading list.
“It’s to inform and get diverse perspectives in there,” she said. “It might not necessarily present a perspective that everything is great at school, but it’s coming from a place to inform and give viewpoints that perhaps the local media don’t get.”
Negri said she invites school leaders to see the story production process at work “so they understand that we’re not trying to be the bad guy,” she said. “But we’re also not trying to be PR."
Negri added that she encourages her students regardless of whether a story is controversial or not. "It’s just what they bring to the table.”
A missed learning opportunity
Attempting to censor controversial stories is a terrible civics lesson and a missed opportunity, Hiestand said.
“I challenge any school official to find a program where education exists any more than it does in journalism,” he said. “Students are coming in, often voluntarily, to tackle stories, to do research, to write, to present it in a public way, and to defend that presentation. It’s about the highest level of education that can take place.”
In addition, given that public school leaders are government officials, they are thus subject to the First Amendment, Hiestand said.
“Unlike the Spanish club, the football team, any other student organization out there, student journalists have specific protections at the federal level and, increasingly, at the state level,” he said. According to the Student Press Law Center, there are currently 18 states with “New Voices” laws, which prevent censoring of content simply because school leaders don’t like it or find it too controversial.
In the 2026 legislative year, such bills have also been introduced in Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, New York and Utah, according to SPLC. “Unless it falls into libel, obscenity, or speech that will create a material and substantial disruption of normal school activities, you need to give students breathing room,” Hiestand said.
When public complaints surface about an article, the wisest recourse is to refer those messages to the student newspaper editor, he said.
“I don’t think principals do themselves any favors by feeling responsible for what is being published in the student newspaper,” Hiestand said. “By engaging in prior review or censoring articles, or making changes to articles, then you are potentially setting up the school district for liability that it might otherwise be able to avoid.”
Hiestand advises that leaders should ensure they have a qualified journalism teacher.
Negri added, “I don’t know of any principals going out there and telling the head football coach what plays to run, or telling the band director what their show theme should be for marching season. It’s kind of crazy to me that we do this with journalism.”
Besides, if school leaders try to censor what students want to publish, they can often publish it elsewhere on the internet, Negri noted.
“It can spread beyond the original student body. It blows up even more than if they had just decided to let things go,” she said.
