Pressing Standards: Student Journalist Schools Administration Censors

If not for the savvy student editor of the Lake Stevens High School Valhalla, 18-year-old senior Alec Bertholet (rhymes with Chevrolet), the student paper would have been forced to remain silent about perhaps the biggest story at the school this year.

In late January, Gary McDonald, a literature teacher at Lake Stevens, included creationism in a category of myths in one of his classes, raising the ire of a few of his students. Though the incident and its fallout (angry parents and a mandate that McDonald change his lesson plans) was covered in depth by the Everett Herald last Thursday, as well as on Michael Medved’s nationally syndicated AM radio show, school administrators initially put the kibosh on a story written for the school paper titled “American Literature Assignment Causes a Stir.”

Standing up for his writer, editor Bertholet met with principal Ken Collins last week during their weekly meeting to go over the paper. Collins killed the story on McDonald because it contained confidential personnel information. Bertholet says Collins also told him the superintendent “doesn’t want this article in the paper.” Collins would not comment for this story. Lake Stevens School District Spokesperson Arlene Hulten says personnel was the only issue.

Bertholet is well versed in student-press rights, and he knew the principal was impeding them. Indeed, Mike Hiestand, an attorney for the Student Press Law Center, says, referring to Collins’s initial decision: “You can’t just ban a whole topic.”