Education leaders facing the crosswinds of political pressure and community scrutiny should tread carefully in their response to student journalism about controversial issues, experts say.

If leaders attempt to censor what students plan to publish, they not only detract from the educational experience but potentially put the school or district in legal jeopardy. And the information is likely to come to light elsewhere, anyway.

“A newspaper is not a public relations arm of the school or the district,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that advocates for student journalists’ free speech rights.

“Too often, these school leaders … see some of the work student journalists do as inconvenient, or embarrassing, or controversial,” said Hiestand. “Instead of stepping up to support that work and give them the resources they need to do that work well and do it accurately, oftentimes, the first instinct is to suppress it.”

When students are writing about controversial or difficult topics — whether in their newspaper, yearbook or a school broadcast program — it’s not usually because they are trying to press adults’ buttons, said Andrea Negri, scholastic press rights director at the Journalism Education Association and a journalism and yearbook teacher at Cypress Woods High School in Texas.

“They’re doing it because it’s a concern for their audience,” she said.

For example, students in Negri’s class preparing their final newspaper issue of the year wrote about a Texas proposal that would include Biblical references and stories in a required reading list.

“It’s to inform and get diverse perspectives in there,” she said. “It might not necessarily present a perspective that everything is great at school, but it’s coming from a place to inform and give viewpoints that perhaps the local media don’t get.”

Negri said she invites school leaders to see the story production process at work “so they understand that we’re not trying to be the bad guy,” she said. “But we’re also not trying to be PR.”

Read the full article about controversial student journalism by Ed Finkel at K-12 Dive.