Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier

In the famous decision Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), the Court held that students in public schools do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Justice White, writing for the majority, even cited this decision in his own ruling. Yet White ruled against the Hazelwood students, asserting that the principal had had a perfect right to pull the articles, and that, given the time pressure he was under, he had acted reasonably to delete the other articles on the same page, since he believed that was the only way that the paper could come out in time. White's opinion was very clear:

First Amendment rights of students in the public schools are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings, and must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment. A school need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission, even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school.

Therefore, White reasoned, a school newspaper could not be seen as the kind of public forum that, say, an empty classroom was. If a school opened its doors to the community, allowing it to rent classroom space for a public meeting, then the school should not be able to decide what was said or done at that meeting. A class held in that classroom was not a public forum, but rather a part of the school curriculum. Certainly, White thought, schools had the right to control what was taught under their sponsorship.

White's ruling rested on the premise that the Spectrum was really part of the Journalism II class. If it had been an underground newspaper printed and circulated by students with no school involvement, it would have had a different legal standing. Indeed, White pointed out, the offending pages of the school paper had been copied and circulated by the students, and the school had taken no action. The school was not trying to control what students read or how they expressed themselves. It was simply trying to teach students how to be good journalists.

Moreover, White said, schools had the right to refuse support to student expression that did not fit the values of the school. If the principal thought that the Spectrum did not do a good job of representing Hazelwood East in the larger community--if he worried, for example, that parents might be offended at the sexual content of some of the articles or that they might not want their younger children to read about birth control--then the principal had every right to exercise "editorial control" over "the style and content of student speech . . . so long as his actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns."