A Bay Area lawmaker is standing up for high school journalists in Santa Ana.
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State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) was scheduled to introduce legislation to the Senate judiciary committee today that would explicitly bar charter school administrators from unlawful
attempts at censoring student newspapers.
Yee said he was introducing SB 438 in response to Orange
County High School of the Arts' insistence that administrators broke no
laws when they halted printing of the student newspaper in
September over objections to its content, according to an Orange County Register report, because the laws apply to public schools, not charter schools.
The new bill from Yee, who authored two of California's student
free-speech laws, would close the loophole the Santa Ana administrators used to justify delaying publication
of the student paper Evolution by more than a week.
California
Education Code Section 48907 would be amended to read, “Pupils of the public schools, including charter schools, shall have
the right to exercise freedom of speech and of the press, including, but
not limited to … the distribution of printed materials or petitions.”
“Students in California, and throughout the country, have a
fundamental right to free expression,” Yee said in a statement. “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.”
Them's your taxpayer dollars at work at OCHSA, people.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.