ACPS Student Newspaper Oversight Proposal Paused By School Board: Report

ALEXANDRIA, VA — A policy change to bring more administrator oversight to student publishing at Alexandria City Public Schools is tabled for now after student journalists raised censorship concerns.

The proposed policy called for an administrator to review "material that may be controversial" before being approved for publishing. If the administrator and staff editor cannot reach an agreement, the final decision would lie with the school's principal. In addition, the principal would have to approve any requests for student articles to be published in non-ACPS publications.

ALX Now first reported the School Board's Thursday tabling of the policy affecting ACPS student publications. School Board members indicated they would continue to work on the proposal in committee.

Theogony, the student newspaper at Alexandria City High School, has been vocal in opposing the new regulations on student publishing and started a petition against it. The change to seek administrator review of "high interest" stories first came up Theogony's amid investigative stories about ACPS. The proposed policy sought to put it into code officially.

"This policy is straight from the playbook of authoritarian governments that fear criticism," Theogony shared in an editorial. "A school district that claims to welcome equity and student voice should be nowhere near it."

The student newspaper said in the editorial that the policy would also "discipline" students working for non-ACPS local publications, remove student ownership of the content they publish, and ban the publication from taking large crowd photos without permission of every individual person pictured.

Theogony instead called for the School Board to adopt the publication's recommended Voiced Unbound Policy. The policy calls for no administrator review of student material before publishing, except in cases where the material could contain libel or slander, cause an "unwarranted invasion of privacy," contain obscenity, violate federal or state law, or incite students to create an unlawful act, violate school district policy or disrupt the "orderly operation of the school."

The ACPS proposal drew national awareness, including from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The organization wrote to the School Board in opposition, claiming the administrator review process violates students' First Amendment rights.

"For more than 15 years, the student newspaper Theogony has operated with editorial independence. That changed only after the paper covered recent school controversies, prompting Alexandria City High School to propose a system of prior review that would empower administrators to silence students before they publish," FIRE said in a statement after the School Board tabling the policy. "But the First Amendment protects Theogony student journalists from censorship unless their speech would seriously disrupt school activities, and this proposal fails to meet that standard."

As the School Board continues discussions on the policy, FIRE called for the School Board to reject the policy to "uphold the editorial freedom of its student journalists."