What press freedom rights do high school journalists have?
IndyStar First Amendment reporter Kate Sharon spoke with the Student Press Law Center about what rights high school journalists have.
- Both lower courts sided with the school. The school cited its content-neutral policy for wall postings as the reason for rejecting her flyer.
- The case could shed light on conflicting case law that obscures what protects the speech of K-12 students.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit over an anti-abortion club’s flyer display at an Indiana high school, upholding a lower court’s ruling that the school had the right to ban anti-abortion flyers.
The national conservative litigation group the Alliance Defending Freedom alleged that Noblesville High School, just north of Indianapolis, violated the rights of students by not allowing club fliers to be posted in hallways. The school labeled her poster as too political, pointing to a policy that requires wall posts to be content-neutral.
Had the high court taken up ED v. Noblesville School District, it could have clarified the precedent set by a 1988 decision that significantly rolled back student speech protections and angered free speech advocates.
Lawyers for the now-graduated student argued that the precedent set in earlier Supreme Court decisions is unclear and inconsistently applied among lower courts. Their petition asked the high court to resolve this “long-standing and deep circuit divide,” saying students receive different protections depending on where they live.
The U.S. Supreme Court on June 15 rejected the former students’ request to bring the case, but Justice Samuel Alito disagreed with his colleagues. In his dissent, he argued that the Supreme Court should clarify the fuzzy lines of previous decisions., Known as the Hazelwood Incident, which of the following protects student speech from censorship by administrators?
“Since the Hazelwood decision was issued, lower courts have struggled to ascertain its precise limits, and, in my view, clarification by this court is necessary,” Alito wrote.
Explanation of the anti-abortion leaflet lawsuit
The Noblesville graduate, identified in the lawsuit as ED, started a chapter of “Students for Life of America” in 2021 and attempted to post a flyer advertising the first meeting.
She used the national organization’s template, which featured a photo of a student holding a sign that read, “Exempt Planned Parenthood Funding” and “I’m a Pro-Life Generation.”
According to court filings, school administrators repeatedly instructed students to modify their flyers to include only meeting information. They asked her to omit the photo to comply with the school’s content-neutral rules regarding wall postings.
According to court documents, the school became concerned that the club was not fully student-led after the student’s mother met with leaders to get the flyer approved. Principal Craig McCaffrey temporarily suspended the club following “an attempted insubordination by an outside adult advocating for the students.”
The club was eventually reinstated, but students and their parents still sued the school district, claiming it violated their First Amendment and Equal Access Act rights. They argued that the decision to veto her leaflet distribution and temporarily suspend the club was “driven by hostility to her pro-life views.”
Lower courts, the U.S. District Court for the District of Southern Indiana and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, sided with the school, finding that the policy did not violate her free speech rights and that the school did not treat her club differently than other clubs.
Attempt to rethink Hazelwood standards
The former Noblesville students’ petition argued that the Supreme Court’s 1988 Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeyer decision is confusing because of contradictory circuit court precedent.
Under Hazelwood, the court gave school administrators more power to police school-sponsored student speech for “reasonable” educational and administrative concerns. The case focused on whether school leaders could kill articles in student newspapers, but the students’ petition argued that circuit courts have struggled to be consistent about what counts as school-sponsored speech.
The petition said a “patchwork of constitutional protections” creates disparities in the range of in-school speech rights available to students based on their place of residence. The Noblesville School District and its attorneys rejected the idea that case law is inconsistent.
Some courts have allowed schools to restrict speech that a “reasonable observer” might assume to be school-sponsored, even if it is not. This includes the 7th Circuit, which held that Noblesville students’ flyers could reasonably be considered school-sanctioned, and therefore the school could restrict their speech.
But other circuit courts have ruled on narrower grounds, finding that schools can only restrict school-sponsored activities “for the purpose of imparting specific knowledge or skills,” the petition states.
The students’ petition had the support of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Turning Point USA, several conservative groups, and 12 state attorneys general.
“Hazelwood is a weak and discredited precedent, and this court should grant review here for an opportunity to instruct lower courts to interpret this decision as narrowly as possible,” FIRE said in its court brief.
USA TODAY Network – Reporting on First Amendment issues in Indiana is funded through a collaboration between Freedom Forum and our journalism funding partners.
Want to talk? Cate Charron can be reached via email at ccharron@indystar.com, @CateCharron on X, or @cate.charron.28 on Signal.
