RAMAPO HIGH WRITER HAD DRUG STORY SPIKED

It was the largest drug bust in years at Ramapo High School --
perfect fodder for the school's award-winning newspaper, Rampage.

Andrew Gross, the paper's 17-year-old investigative reporter, ran
down the arrests and probed the school's drug subculture. His
1,500-word article was slated for March, but district Superintendent
Paul Saxton refused to let it run because he feared it could make it
more difficult for the arrested students to receive a fair trial.

"We've got to be very careful, especially when the two people we
talked about were going to be subject to adjudication," Saxton said.

The incident shows the conflict that arises when a newspaper bears a
school's name. School administrators must weigh a student
journalist's right to publish newsworthy articles against the
school's right to keep certain student information confidential.
While student reporters' free speech rights can't be sacrificed,
student journalists are not allowed to advocate irresponsible behavior.

Certainly, journalists in public schools don't have the same rights
as the professional press. In a 1988 ruling, Hazelwood School
District v. Kuhlmeier, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote that
administrators can review newspapers before they are published and
pull stories that are offensive or expose the school to liability.

Fort Lee High School Principal Jay Berman said reviewing the paper
gives him a chance to fix typos and grammar.

"I just want to make sure that everything that comes out of this
building is appropriate and would not be offensive to anyone and is
of extremely high quality," Berman said.

But several North Jersey advisers say that administrative review
encourages student journalists to steer clear of controversial
stories and that censorship is often unjustifiable.

Mark Goodman, the outgoing executive director of the Washington,
D.C.-based Student Press Law Center, said his organization does not
track instances of censorship. The Garden State Scholastic Press
Association does not track such numbers either.

Yet, Goodman said that longtime advisers around the nation tell him
that "the pressures to censor are greater today than they've ever been."

Censorship's Bar

In New Jersey, "the burden for censorship is really supposed to be
pretty high," said John Tagliareni, Bergenfield High School's
newspaper adviser for the past 35 years.

He points to a case from 1989, when the principal of Clearview Junior
High School in Mullica Hill censored a student's newspaper reviews of
the movies "Rain Man" and "Mississippi Burning" because the movies
were rated R.

The student's mother sued the district and, in 1994, the state
Supreme Court found that no one at the school "explained how such
R-rated movie reviews posed a danger to student health."

Nevertheless, experts say cases like these are rare because most
student journalists and their advisers have friendly relationships
with administrators and often work out differences. In addition,
advisers in New Jersey -- who are almost always teachers -- have
little formal training and are unlikely to want to get into arguments
with administrators who are, after all their bosses.

Lora Geftic, the adviser to Hasbrouck Heights High School's newspaper
Pilot's Log, says compromises are often reached instead. When
Principal Peter O'Hare, for instance, objected to a cartoon of
then-President Bill Clinton with his pants down and hearts on his
boxer shorts, the journalists added a towel.

Journalists at Ramapo said they never had to kowtow to the
administration prior to Gross' article being killed.

Anatomy of a Story

Gross enjoyed access to school officials, so when he learned that
Franklin Lakes police had arrested two juveniles on charges of
possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia on Jan. 30, he went to
Vice Principal Thomas Gorman.

Gross said Gorman told him the two students had smelled of pot while
walking the halls and a biology teacher found a bag containing 32
grams of marijuana. Gorman, who is now the principal of Westwood
Regional High School, did not respond to calls seeking comment.

Gross went beyond the bust in his reporting and talked to police
about drug use at the school. Students told him they had seen hard
drugs such as cocaine on campus.

"I knew that this article was going to make waves," Gross said.

During a conversation with Principal Michael Jordan about another
matter on Feb. 8, Gross told him that Gorman had given him
information about the drug arrests for an upcoming article. He said
he thought that warning Jordan might protect Gorman.

Jordan said he would ask Saxton, the superintendent, about whether
Gorman had divulged too much information. Jordan, who is now
principal of Maywood Avenue School, said he was surprised when Saxton
replied that the article couldn't run.

In an interview, Saxton said he was worried about the use of the
arrested students' names in the article, even though Gross and Jordan
said names were not used.

Gross said he was given a choice: publish the story without any
information from school district employees or wait for the outcome of
the students' cases. He chose to wait but never heard anything from
administrators.

He let the issue drop because he was applying to colleges and didn't
want to harm his chances by fighting with the administration. He was
depressed about the article, though, and students gave him a hard
time for not fighting Saxton's decision.

"My story is gone, my rights have been violated, and now people are
accusing me of being weak in the face of adversity," Gross said.

Gross is now 18 and a freshman at George Washington University in
Washington, D.C. He believes that Saxton would like to hear the
conclusion of his reporting: that there is a minimal drug trade
within the school.

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KEY RULINGS

Court cases on student journalists' rights:

Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District This 1969
decision states school officials cannot punish students or limit
their speech unless they can show it will disrupt normal school
activities or invade the rights of others.

Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier The 1988 decision states that
school officials can censor school-sponsored publications if they can
present a reasonable educational justification. The Tinker standard
applies, however, if the newspaper is "a public forum for student
expression" where student editors make their own decisions.

Student media law experts and courts have argued, however, that the
New Jersey Constitution offers greater protection for free speech
than the U.S. Constitution and sets a high bar for censorship.