School paper printed after flap

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on March 28, 2008

An impasse between the Amherst Regional Middle School press corps and school officials was resolved last week when the school disseminated the student newspaper complete with a survey saying students don't think administrators listen to them.

But there is still room for disagreement, says everyone concerned.

School officials say they regret the American Civil Liberties Union, which charged that the administration's role in the matter amounted to censorship, got involved before parents raised concerns with teachers and administrators.

Complaining up the ladder

"The process that we always use when there are concerns in the school is to ask parents and kids to go to the source, go to the teacher. If that doesn't resolve the situation, bring it to the next level," said Interim Co-principal Fran Ziperstein.

"When a parent comes, we'll say, Did you talk to the teacher?' That process didn't happen, and that was unfortunate."

Students and parents say the young reporters tried repeatedly to talk to school officials, but teachers and administrators didn't listen to them - corroborating, as it were, the survey's results, they say.

"I think it's really hard for people to grasp this, but this group of kids was taking leadership and our role as parents was to support and give them information and sources if they needed it," said parent Sharon Vardatira. "It's about the kids finally being able to speak on their own behalf. That was the crux of it."

Students worked on the March edition of the Chestnut Street Journal and their student survey for weeks, interviewing 175 of their 575 classmates and spending February tallying the results.

Some 76 percent of respondents said the school's disciplinary practices make the school "a worse place to come every day." Some 78 percent, in what the student writers termed "the most tragic response," said their voices are not listened to in the school's decision making.

School officials told the students they would have to do the survey over before they published it, an act of censorship in the estimation of ACLU lawyer Bill Newman, of Northampton, with whom the students had been in touch.

In a March 17 letter to administrators, he wrote, "It is ironic indeed that when a student publication says that middle school students' voices are into being heard by the administration, the administration's response it to silence student voices. Accordingly, I ask you to reconsider your ban on the publication and urge you to quickly rescind it."

Ziperstein maintains school officials were trying to teach students' good journalism.

"This was an opportunity to do some good work, and I think some of those lessons were lost for kids, for staff and for parents. I think the staff was challenged when the opportunity to do some good teaching wasn't possible," she said.

Ziperstein said the situation took on a life of its own, preventing school staff from working with students to revise their work, when the Daily Hampshire Gazette published The Chestnut Street Journal online having received a copy of it from Newman.

School officials decided they might as well disseminate it themselves, Ziperstein said, which they did, with a cover letter, crafted by the students and including administrative talking points.

"We wanted to make sure kids knew that we were taking seriously the message that students want to have a voice in the school, and we certainly heard that message," Ziperstein said, of the decision to release the paper without reworking the survey.

"We're just really happy that they decided to just publish the paper and allow it to be printed," Josh Wolfsun, one of the reporters, said in response. The students got good feedback from readers, he said. "The majority of people I talked to at least said they liked it."

Ziperstein said school officials remain concerned about what they regard as a lack of distinction between the news and editorializing, among other points.

"We were frankly frustrated and challenged by the fact that parents didn't come to either the advisers or us administrators and that we didn't have any discussions with the students prior to this being brought to the ACLU," Ziperstein said.

Parents have contacted her by email with a range of responses, the co-principal said. Some questioned the ACLU's involvement and others were unhappy that their children's photos had been posted on the Internet in the online version of the newspaper, Ziperstein said. Still others said they were concern about what looked like censorship of students. "I understand and respect that," Ziperstein said. "But it's not what our intent was. I think it was misunderstood."

Vardatira, Wolfsun's mother, said it would have been better if school officials had tried working with the students earlier, instead of insisting they needed to do their survey over and that they would hold the newspaper until it met the administrators' standards. "There were points at which the advisors and administrators could have said, Let's talk about this more, Let's think about what could be done. Let's talk about the next steps,'" Vardatira said.

To Vardatira, the dust-up may point to a larger issue - that the schools' resources are stretched so thin in the face of years of budget cuts that teachers and administrators are stressed and don't have the time it takes to work with students in the most productive way.

"I think of this whole newspaper thing as the canary in the mineshaft of Amherst education," Vardatira said. "I actually think some of the advisors got really personal around this. We don't think the kids should have to be worried about the teachers and their stress. We feel like they should get the best response. As a parent, I feel maybe this should be a wake-up call that you can't keep taking away resources and not have stuff happen."

Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.