A media hubbub yesterday followed the news that Wilson High School Principal Kimberly Martin had instituted a policy of prior review of articles in the school newspaper, the Wilson Beacon. Pressed to explain why a school paper that had previously published without such constraints now had to pass muster with the administration, Martin issued a statement: “It is my intention to make all decisions based on student learning and the decision of prior review is in line with my personal and professional philosophy as an educator. Keeping students safe and protected are parts of my job that I take very seriously.”
Indeed, a DCPS spokeswoman told the Erik Wemple Blog that “prior review of student publications was standard practice” at Martin’s previous posts.
So just how did this “standard practice” work out?
Prior to coming to the District, Martin worked as the principal of Aspen High School in Colorado. Though it’s ranked as one of its state’s top high schools, Aspen High School has perhaps the country’s worst-ranked newspaper name — “The Skier Scribbler.”
In the 2013-14 school year, Audrey Sichel served as co-editor-in-chief of The Skier Scribbler. One day in December 2013, says Sichel, an alert from an administration employee came over the school’s intercom. Problem was, the official used a code that confused not only students but some staffers as well. For a time, folks didn’t understand what was going on, recalls Sichel, an Aspen native who is now a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “It could have been an armed man in the hallway. It turned out later to be a medical emergency,” says Sichel.
Nathaniel Karbank, one of the staffers at the “Skier Scribbler,” decided to analyze the matter in a critical editorial. “I think that the administration could do a better job of just keeping us in the loop and just making sure we know what’s going on,” said Karbank in summing up the piece in a chat with the Erik Wemple Blog.
Martin received a list of pending articles through a faculty member — and didn’t like what she saw. “Her logic behind the fact that we couldn’t publish it was that we were targeting the particular person who was having the med emergency,” remembers Sichel. “So we decided we would revise it to make sure it didn’t have that effect.” No matter — Martin still wasn’t signing off. “I confronted her with the revisions that the student had made,” she says. “She basically unprofessionally told me that that article couldn’t be published. She raised her voice and would not let us continue the discussion and told me that we couldn’t try to revise it again.”
Judging from her tone, Sichel didn’t feel “safe and protected” by the principal’s vigilance. Elizabeth Stewart-Severy, an Aspen High English teacher and adviser to the “Skier Scribbler,” confirms Sichel’s account. “The student made all the changes Kim [Martin] requested, and we went through several drafts. She actually stopped replying and finally, a month later, said that under no circumstances could we publish the article.”
From that point onward, says Sichel, prior review at Aspen High School morphed into protocol. Editors would send Martin blurbs explaining each story — adding to their workload — and await word as to whether the principal wanted a bigger peek. “We knew which ones she might want to see more of,” says Sichel. “So we were prepared for that. I do think it affected our staff writers and what they felt comfortable writing about.”
Girls dominate this story. In addition to Sichel at Aspen High, the three Wilson High student journalists who’ve been at the forefront of the paper’s campaign against prior review have been girls — co-editors-in-chief Erin Doherty and Helen Malhotra and written content editor Rachel Page. No great coincidence there, says Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center. “[I]t’s almost always girls who bear the brunt of the censorship,” writes LoMonte in an e-mail to the Erik Wemple Blog. “High school journalism is a heavily girl-dominated activity, and it’s invariably the girls who want to push the boundaries on issues of social and political concern.”
Yesterday afternoon, the D.C. public schools announced that Martin had negotiated an agreement that might preserve the newspaper’s independence.
As for Martin’s position on the situation, D.C. Public Schools spokeswoman Anna Gregory passed along this reaction: “Kim Martin is a supporter of journalism and does not want to get in the way of budding journalists. The students and advisors are working on a policy that will meet everyone’s needs, which we can expect on Thursday. We cannot comment on past practices of another district.”
