Hazelwood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988)

Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier

No. 86-836

Argued October 13, 1987
Decided January 13, 1988
484 U.S. 260

ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF

APPEALS FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT

Syllabus

Respondents, former high school students who were staff members of the school’s newspaper, filed suit in Federal District Court against petitioners, the school district and school officials, alleging that respondents’ First Amendment rights were violated by the deletion from a certain issue of the paper of two pages that included an article describing school students’ experiences with pregnancy and another article discussing the impact of divorce on students at the school. The newspaper was written and edited by a journalism class, as part of the school’s curriculum. Pursuant to the school’s practice, the teacher in charge of the paper submitted page proofs to the school’s principal, who objected to the pregnancy story because the pregnant students, although not named, might be identified from the text, and because he believed that the article’s references to sexual activity and birth control were inappropriate for some of the younger students. The principal objected to the divorce article because the page proofs he was furnished identified by name (deleted by the teacher from the final version) a student who complained of her father’s conduct, and the principal believed that the student’s parents should have been given an opportunity to respond to the remarks or to consent to their publication. Believing that there was no time to make necessary changes in the articles if the paper was to be issued before the end of the school year, the principal directed that the pages on which they appeared be withheld from publication even though other, unobjectionable articles were included on such pages. The District Court held that no First Amendment violation had occurred. The Court of Appeals reversed.

Held: Respondents’ First Amendment rights were not violated.

(a) First Amendment rights of students in the public schools are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings, and must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment. A school need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission, even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school.

(b) The school newspaper here cannot be characterized as a forum for public expression. School facilities may be deemed to be public forums only if school authorities have, by policy or by practice, opened the facilities for indiscriminate use by the general public, or by some segment of the public, such as student organizations. If the facilities have instead been reserved for other intended purposes, communicative or otherwise, then no public forum has been created, and school officials may impose reasonable restrictions on the speech of students, teachers, and other members of the school community. The school officials in this case did not deviate from their policy that the newspaper’s production was to be part of the educational curriculum and a regular classroom activity under the journalism teacher’s control as to almost every aspect of publication. The officials did not evince any intent to open the paper’s pages to indiscriminate use by its student reporters and editors, or by the student body generally. Accordingly, school officials were entitled to regulate the paper’s contents in any reasonable manner.

(c) 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. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U.S. 503, distinguished. Educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities, so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.

(d) The school principal acted reasonably in this case in requiring the deletion of the pregnancy article, the divorce article, and the other articles that were to appear on the same pages of the newspaper.

795 F.2d 1368, reversed.

WHITE, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which REHNQUIST, C.J., and STEVENS, O’CONNOR, and SCALIA, JJ., joined. BRENNAN, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which MARSHALL and BLACKMUN, JJ., joined, post, p. 277.