The state Senate on Monday unanimously approved a bill that would uphold the free-speech rights of students, months after a prominent Southern California charter school censored its student newspaper and temporarily stopped it from publishing.
"Students in California and throughout the country, have a fundamental right to free expression," said state Senator Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, who sponsored the legislation, SB 438. "It is quite disheartening to hear that taxpayer-funded charter schools think their students do not deserve the same rights as those afforded to students at public and private schools throughout our state."
The California Charter School Association opposed the bill which now goes to the Assembly for consideration. Yee's bill was born after controversy was sparked in September at a Santa Ana charter school.
Last year, Sue Vaughn, principal at Orange County High School of the Arts, halted the publication of the school's student paper after disapproving of a story on the cafeteria's management company, Alegre Foods. The story included facts from the Alegre's website, pointing out that the company saw itself as "Christian-based" with the purpose of becoming "the number one full food service provider for all Christian and Private Schools."
Vaughn thought the information was irrelevant. She told the paper's student editor, Taylor Erickson, 17, that the Christian references could prompt phone calls from angry parents, Erickson told the Orange County Register. Vaughn stopped the paper's publication, and assistant principal Michael Ciecek, sent an e-mail to the paper's faculty advisor, threatening to discontinue the student newspaper unless the administration pre-approved future articles prior to publication. According to Orange County Register's Sept. 11 story, reprinted here:
All future newspaper publications will be cleared by Sue (Vaughn) or I before being delivered to Maritza (Ahn, the school's purchasing technician) for printing," Ciecek said in the e-mail. "We will not continue to use leadership or yearbook funds to publish something (digitally or in paper versions) that the administration has not approved. If you are not able to comply with this, then the newspaper will no longer be published.
State law forbids such actions unless the material is "obscene, libelous or slanderous" or incites students to "create a clear and present danger" on the campus or "substantial disruption" to school operations. Some legal experts criticized the school's response, and the school administration softened its position and allowed the paper to publish without pre-approval.
The simmering issue reignited days later, however, when Ralph Opacic, the charter's president and executive director, issued a statement defending administrators, arguing that charter schools were exempted from the law defining student rights. The stance got the attention of Lee, triggering the current legislation.
Now, the students have a new lesson in how a bill becomes a law.
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