Grand Island, Nebraska is a quiet city. Nestled in the center of the state, the town’s population nearly doubles in size once a year when tourists travel in for the annual sandhill crane bird migration. But once the birds leave, so does the noise. That is until earlier this year when a local high school’s award-winning newspaper and journalism program garnered national attention for being abruptly “paused” after they published an LGBTQ pride issue.
Marcus Pennell, a former student, and trans columnist for the Northwest High School’s Viking Saga newspaper, said the pride issue was the first published after students were told by the school board they could no longer use names not on their birth certificates. “We kind of knew what the administration was trying to do, taking our names and pronouns away, so we wanted to make a stand while still following the rule,” Marcus said.
The student journalists told Teen Vogue that after they received the school board directive, the newspaper staff decided to dedicate their June issue to LGBTQ topics, including student editorials on LGBTQ subjects, and a news article titled, “Pride and prejudice: LGBTQIA+” on the origins of Pride Month and the history of homophobia, according to The Grand Island Independent, which first reported the story.
Shortly after the issue was published, the school shut down the paper on May 22, sparking debates over student journalism and censorship.
“When I read the GI Independent article, it seems the administration as much as admitted it cut the program because the student paper published pro-LGBTQ content,” said Max Kautsch, a First Amendment attorney and hotline counsel to the Nebraska Press Association. “If true, such a decision is retaliatory viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment rights of every student who was enrolled in the class for this academic year.”
Superintendent Jeff Edwards, and current principal P.J. Smith, did not respond to requests seeking comment, but Edwards told The Grand Island Independent that suspending the paper and program was an “administrative” decision, and one not based on “one or two articles.” Edwards reportedly said there had been talks about stopping the paper prior to the pride issue. While Zach Mader, the board’s vice president, told the Independent, “The very last issue that came out this year, there was… a little bit of hostility amongst some. There were editorials that were essentially, I guess what I would say, LGBTQ.”
But for Pennell and his classmates, the decision was not shocking. The paper, which had nine students on staff and had been in print for 54 years, covered the school’s 700 students. Pennell said the queer community at the school is strong, but not everyone is accepting.
“The queer students at Northwest definitely built their own community out of not having one,” Pennell said. “I wish I could say I was more surprised about their blatantly transphobic decision, but I knew a lot of people in my community were pretty upset over me just being myself.”
The closing of the Viking Saga was one of many instances of students battling with school administrations seemingly seeking to censor or limit distribution of yearbooks and publication of articles. At this time 16 states have laws intended to protect school publications from censorship, according to the Student Press Law Center (SPLC), but a similar measure died in the Nebraska Legislature this year.
More recently school officials in Longwood, Florida reportedly ordered that a photo spread be covered in the Lyman High School yearbook showing students protesting the new “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prohibits classroom instruction and discussion around gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through grade 3. According to Click Orlando, the school board voted instead to place disclaimer stickers in the yearbook, rather than covering up the photos. The district superintendent reportedly said before the vote that the intent wasn't to silence anyone, rather to make clear that the protest was student-led and not school-sponsored.
In Arkansas last year, school administrators removed a two-page year-in-review spread from a high school’s yearbook that featured the 2020 election, the pandemic, California wildfires, and the murder of George Floyd, the SPLC reported. According to the organization, the school said “community backlash” was the reason for the pages’ removal, though SPLC said they have not received any documentation — which they sought via a public records request — showing this “backlash.”
“The U.S. Supreme Court has held that, although high school students have fewer constitutional rights than adults outside of school, it has also held that students do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,’” said Kautsch. “To effectuate this public policy, the Court has established that a public high school administration is permitted to regulate and even censor students' First Amendment rights if it has a legitimate educational reason to do so. But here, there seem to be no legitimate educational reasons to cut an award-winning program that was not seeing a decline in enrollment. Moreover, none was offered.”
The ACLU of Nebraska also doesn’t seem to think the school’s reason for limiting those rights passes muster. In a statement in August, the ACLU denounced the decision and signaled legal action, warning the district to preserve all documents and communication records leading to the district’s decision to pause the program and newspaper.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications dean, Shari Veil, voiced her support and admiration for the student journalists by letting them know they are all welcome to learn and report at the college’s various news outlets. And local Nebraska high school newspaper students rallied behind Pennell and the Viking Saga. Cady Blackstock, a senior at Lincoln East High School and a journalist on her school paper said after learning what happened at Northwest she was extremely upset. So much so that her paper’s staff took in all the information and ultimately decided to have a long conversation with their school’s principal on the topic. “We talked about our own limits and standards of content we put out,” she said. “My advisor and I encouraged our writers to not be afraid to write what they want.”
While the future of the program and the Viking Saga hangs in the balance, Pennell is hopeful that the paper will make a return to allow the next generation of student journalists the opportunity to learn the power of the free press.
“Even if censoring efforts are successful, queer people will still find ways to tell their stories and be themselves,” he said. “Just like they have for centuries.”
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