New Voices, a student-powered nonpartisan grassroots movement established in 2019, has created a new voice of protection for student-journalists across the nation but Pennsylvania has yet to join the party, further delaying students’ rights of free press.
According to the Student Press Law center, Pennsylvania’s administrative code does bar censorship of student media “simply because it is critical of the school or its administration,” yet this clause isn’t strong enough to prevent the censorship of student journalists across the state.
The law was created to counteract the impact of the 1988 Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier Supreme Court decision that schools are to, “censor stories concerning teen pregnancy and the effects of divorce on children from a school-sponsored student newspaper.”
New Voices’ law is as follows: a bill that ensures that student media can only be censored if that media is libelous or slanderous, contains an unwarranted invasion of privacy, violates state or federal law or incites students to disrupt the orderly operation of a school. New Voices laws also prohibit retaliation against advisers who refuse to censor student journalists.
The law has now been adopted in 18 states, but there are many more to come.
In 2020, New Voices was introduced to Pennsylvanian Education Committee for the first time sponsored by Senator Andy Dinniman, yet the bill never received a hearing. The bill has remained almost entirely unheard since then.
Though process has been hard to come by for this bill, ultimately, it’s now up to the students to make their voices heard by speaking to their legislators.
A student at the University of Texas at Dallas, Gregorio Olivares-Gutierrez, 21, a political-science and philosophy major who is the editor-in-chief of his own paper, The Retrograde, has dealt with censorship within the university’s previous newspaper previously known as The Mercury.
In Sep. 2024, Olivares-Gutierrez was fired from his position of the editor-in-chief of The Mercury over the paper’s coverage of campus protests of Israel’s war on Gaza on allegations that he violated bylaws for student publications.
“Bills like New Voices are not being passed in Texas. We’re not getting those protections at all,” Olivares-Gutierrez said.
New Voices’ creation is meant to protect high-schoolers and college students, however, in states like Texas and Pennsylvania, the fear of censorship of school administrations can lead students to be discouraged from writing about topics or news that’s important to them.
Students’ ability to feel confident that the topics they’re writing about won’t end up thrown out or considered libelous is paramount to success as a student and future journalist.
“Students may believe that ‘oh, there’s a person above me who has authority and they’re going to decide what I can and cannot publish,’ that mindset may instill within them a mindset of, well, you know, if they said I can’t write about that, that’s a topic that I guess is taboo,” Olivares-Gutierrez said.
With this considered, “you may have a bunch of student-journalists who are almost trained to defer from power,” said Olivares-Gutierrez, however, “when we see journalists choose to not cover topics, people notice. They criticize it.”
The criticism of the journalism industry has always been part of the job, but with student-journalists starting at a point of censorship, “it can discredit the media industry, which is already in its own kind of crisis at the moment,” said Olivares-Gutierrez.
This is where New Voices becomes a new source of confidence for students by providing protection at the state level.
It’s not just New Voices that can protect the students, though. Resources such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Student Press Law Center and the Society of Professional Journalists all exist for students to reach out to when they are facing issues of censorship.
The only requirement is that students feel confident enough to reach out.
“There are a bunch of people happy and eager to support them. Messing with schools to make sure they’re living up to their constitutionally required mandates is what they do for a living,” Olivares-Gutierrez said.
Olivares-Gutierrez encourages students to try out new things and experiment knowing these resources are always there to back them up.
“Students have a lot of autonomy even without New Voices. New Voices just gives them further legal protections, which I think are important,” Olivares-Gutierrez said.
New voices protections alongside First Amendment rights are an integral part of student-press freedom. Voices being heard at the high-school and collegiate levels can dictate the future of the nation’s laws and what problems are prioritized.
It always starts with the students, and New Voices stands to guarantee that students can tell the stories and news that impacts their communities both on and off campus with curiosity and candor.