The Hazelwood School District Vs. Kuhlmeier: Famous Court Case

The Hazelwood School District vs. Kuhlmeier is one of the famous court cases in U.S history. In The Hazelwood School District vs. Kuhlmeier case a decision was made by the Supreme Court of the United States that held public academic institutions student newspapers that have not been established as forums for student expression are subjected to a lower level of the first amendment than independent student expression or newspapers established by policy as forums of student expression.
The Hazelwood School District case occurred in 1988. In this case the principle of Hazelwood East High School Principal Robert Reynolds, found two articles that were deemed inappropriate to be published in the school newspaper, and he prohibited them to be published.

The divorce article was objected by the principle because a student complained of her father’s conduct without the consent or opportunity to respond to the remarks by the parents. The student who were also staff members of the school newspaper felt that their First Amendment rights were being violated because of the deletion of pages discussing pregnancy and divorce. According to the District Court held that no First Amendment right violation had occurred. It was said that the officials did not evince any intent to open the page’s paper’s to indiscriminate use by its students, reporters and editors. It was also said that school officials were entitled to regulate the paper’s contents in any reasonable manner. Reporter’s said the school principal acted reasonably through the whole case. Reynold’s required pages of the article to be deleted completely instead of having the student’s work on changes because of time

The court ended up making the decision that no action for libel or invasion of privacy could have been retained against the school by the subjects and their families. Essentially this case considered that under the first amendment schools can control non-forum student newspapers when their decision can be justified by an educational purpose however, this does not allow school functionaries to repress writings based on personal opinion. The standard for determining when a school may punish student expression that happens to occur on school premises is not the standard for determining when a school may refuse to lend its name and resources to the dissemination of student expression (Supreme Court Cases 1999). The Board of Education allocated funds from the budget for the printing of The Spectrum in dealing with this case for printing expenses, other cost that were associated with the school newspaper and even a portion of the journalism’s teacher salary carried by the board. Since the school’s publication was mostly funded by the board, it was seen by the Supreme Court not to be a forum for public