It is always a concern for high school and college student journalists when they are writing a story that could be labeled as “controversial.” But these worries could soon diminish as the Illinois General Assembly passed a new piece of legislation on March 2 that aims to combat censorship by school administrations.
House Bill 5902, introduced by Rep. Will Guzzardi (D), is designed to give further first amendment rights to student journalists in both high school and college. Here is brief synopsis from the Illinois General Assembly’s website on the proposed legislation:
“[This law] provides that a student journalist has the right to exercise freedom of speech and of the press in school-sponsored media, regardless of whether the media is supported financially by the school district or by use of school facilities or produced in conjunction with a class in which the student is enrolled. [The law also] provides that a student journalist is responsible for determining the news, opinion, feature, and advertising content of school-sponsored media.”
This proposed bill is considered an anti-Hazelwood law. Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier was a case in 1988 that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, when students at Hazelwood East High School in Missouri felt their first amendment rights were violated. Since there was no time to edit the paper before the end of the year, their school administrators eliminated two stories about teen pregnancy and divorce that the school deemed to be too controversial.
The case went up through the court system, with some courts siding with the students and some with the administration. In the end, the Supreme Court decided 5-3 in favor of the Hazelwood East High School administration. This decision gave more control over to school administrators and less freedom to student journalists.
This new legislation would, in a way, repeal the Hazelwood decision at a state level. In 1997, a similar bill was passed through the Illinois House and Senate before being vetoed by then-Governor Jim Edgar.
In 2007, the College Campus Press Act was passed in Illinois that stated all campus media was a public forum for expression and that no media could be subjected to prior review by public officials. This act was specific to college student journalists, which is another reason why New Voices Illinois, a movement that wants to give more freedom to student journalists to write and report without receiving consequences, wants to allow high school journalists to have the same freedoms.
Brenda Field, Illinois state director for the Journalism Education Association, and Stan Zoller, Legislation Committee Chairman of the Illinois Journalism Education Association, are a part of the New Voices Illinois organization and have been working hard to have this bill recognized. They were initially led to Guzzardi, who then proposed the bill, which is now waiting to be decided in the Senate.
Field described how Illinois and other states, like North Dakota and Maryland, are now part of a national movement, a movement to go back in time to pre-Hazelwood, where students had more freedom to write what they wanted to.
According to Field, the timetable as to when this bill could be signed into law by Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner is unknown, but not much opposition lies ahead of it. It could be a matter of weeks before it reaches his desk.
UPDATE: On Tuesday, May 10, the legislation tentatively passed through a Senate committee and will be revisited next week.
