Student Voice Requires Adult Courage

Essay 6.1

The Dead or Dying State of Student Journalism at Independent Schools

March 8, 2019 · Age of Awareness (Medium)

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Editorial note: The subscription prices and school expenses in this essay are historical figures from its 2019 publication, not current quotations.

From the fourth grade on, and now as a high school teacher at my alma mater, I’ve been privileged to belong to the independent school community. Not only have I experienced firsthand what makes our small but vibrant community special, but I’ve also connected with colleagues and peer institutions to hone my craft — as well as learn more about the values our schools share. Across the board, I’ve found that independent schools pride themselves on offering one-on-one attention, smaller class sizes, and a caring and nurturing environment for students to reach their potential.

Many independent schools also share similar mission statements, which emphasize critical thinking, communication, and creativity. Moreover, the word “leadership” comes up often while scrolling through private school admissions materials — and while I believe that our collective school community upholds many of its core values, as a whole we are deficient at offering and teaching journalism, including newspaper production, essential for fostering those values.

What’s more, in the so-called “fake-news” era, with divided politicians unable or unwilling to agree upon a common set of facts, and with President Trump calling the media the “enemy of the people,” more than ever it’s critical for schools to invest in building robust journalism programs. As I write this article, I can almost hear administrators, who say that their schools already teach media literacy through existing curriculum. I maintain that unless students are also creating and disseminating their own news on a frequent basis, meant for public consumption, this is wholly insufficient.

Measuring Lack of Student Media at Independent Schools

Beyond a handful of the nation’s most prestigious and oldest independent schools, I fear that too few independent schools offer journalism programs or foster student publications. Where they do exist, they are likely to be on life support. This is a shame, especially because of journalism’s increasing centrality to everything that private schools hold dear about education, not the least of which is equipping young minds with skills to succeed after graduation.

Several years ago, I spoke with Mark Briggs, a former Ford Fellow of Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Poynter Institute, who told me how experience in the newsroom gives students a big advantage in an increasingly competitive job market.

“If you can produce students who command a very diverse set of skills, who can also present themselves and create ideas and get behind them, and even sell those ideas — that’s the entrepreneurial spirit that we need in journalists,” says Briggs, also author of Journalism Next: Practical Guide to Digital Reporting and Publishing. “To me, that’s kind of the Holy Grail right now of journalism education.”

I couldn’t agree more, but I would add that while many students know how to create content, too few know how to produce high-quality content, the kind that makes them stand out to not only college admission officers, but also potential employers. We need to teach and encourage students to create and share original, quality content to brand themselves and their abilities in an ocean of increasingly indistinguishable resumes.

Beyond journalism’s capacity to foster an informed citizenry, the discipline might also help students achieve academic success. A comprehensive 2008 study commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America Foundation found, among other benefits from supporting student voice, that “students with journalism experience in high school did better than non-journalism students in terms of both high school grades and ACT scores.”

The independent school community must take a difficult first step in acknowledging that when it comes to supporting student voice, in which journalism and student media play essential roles, we have serious work to do; 200 institutions claim membership in the Association of Independent Schools in New England, the geographic epicenter of the private school world. Yet Helen Smith, who serves as Executive Director of the New England Scholastic Press Association (NESPA), recently told me that the organization’s membership usually includes fewer than a dozen independent schools, compared to 70 or so public schools.

In New England, as elsewhere around the country, public schools far outnumber private schools, which likely accounts for the disparity in NESPA membership. Still, no math justifies any New England private school’s not paying an annual $50 membership fee, especially if that school wishes to stay true to its mission. In addition to providing a network of other advisers and student publications, NESPA provides consulting services and award recognition.

“I can’t imagine how any school, private or public, can be serious about student voice and not belong to NESPA, the region’s premier scholastic journalism body,” I told Smith.

“In any school, I think an awful lot of what determines the strength of student media depends on what administrators and department heads are ready to encourage,” Smith said.

Her words ring true, and I wish that more private schools had the foresight to encourage student media.

But it’s not just on a local level that support for private school student media falls short. I spoke with the President of the Journalism Education Association (JEA), Sarah Nichols, who oversees the nation’s premier scholastic educational body for student media and advisers. She told me that her organization doesn’t keep track of public versus private school membership, “but comparatively, the private-school number is quite low.”

All of this reveals a simple but brutal truth — unless a private school is working to establish a dynamic journalism program, it’s not doing all that it can to support students or sustain its philosophy. Furthermore, at least in Massachusetts, many schools are about to break the $50,000 tuition ceiling, making any financial excuse for inaction completely unjustifiable.

To learn more about the quality of student media at private schools, I connected with Erica Salkin, a professor of communication studies at Whitworth University (WA), who is writing a book about the subject. She has spent the previous several years reaching out to different kinds of private schools, learning about the strengths and weaknesses of their journalism programs, or if they exist at all. In reviewing her findings, Salkin said she found three chief reasons why administrators decide against taking action.

We Just Don’t Have the Money

“One was we just don’t have the money,” Salkin told me. “‘We don’t have the funds. It’d be great, but we don’t have the money.’”

Upon hearing this, I cringed, telling Salkin, “this is a lazy and illegitimate excuse.” I didn’t share these words lightly, and I couldn’t hold back my frustration. I advise The Gator, the multi-award-winning online student newspaper of Brimmer and May School (MA), and here is an exact rundown of the School’s total expenses for student journalism, costs which we control by operating mostly on digital platforms. Not only does doing so incur only nominal costs, but it’s also green, which comports with many schools’ philosophies.

A yearly subscription option to WordPress, the industry standard among website-construction software services, is $300, which includes access to live-chat support, for schools with questions about settings or controls. Members also don’t need to worry about updating security patches, which is done for them. This plan also gives them access to several special templates, which they can enhance with additional coding. Last spring, The Gator outsourced programming for several design modifications to Codeable for a fair price, but I argue that aesthetics should come second to content quality.

There can be bumps in the road for digital media; this fall The Gator was hacked by an unknown entity, resulting in inappropriate and offensive headline changes. My students published a special notice to readers, and WordPress responded quickly by updating security settings on the backend, and urging my editors to take advantage of two-step password authentication. No significant controversy ensued, and the School seemed to appreciate the transparency and quick action.

No other expenditures are essential, although The Gator has purchased memberships to other platforms, all easily embeddable to the site. These include a $63 subscription to SoundCloud Pro to host podcasts, Vimeo Plus for $59.95 to host video, Shorthand for $500 to produce creative layouts, and about $100 worth of credit on Bigstock to feature non-student-taken photographs. Those users who need to limit costs can easily upload video and audio content directly onto their sites.

If you can’t think of anybody at your school with the technological know-how to learn WordPress, I would encourage you to ask for student input. I would bet that tech-savvy, dedicated students could take the lead, as they should with all aspects of scholastic journalism. Regardless of how much help is needed, I’m impressed by SNO Sites, which specializes in helping schools launch and maintain WordPress scholastic journalism sites for $400 a year, plus a one-time setup fee of $250.

If this is too much money, Nichols reminds me that schools don’t have to pay a dime.

“You do not need to host and build your own website if you can’t,” she says. “Even if you want to have a newspaper or a news magazine that is traditionally laid out like a magazine or a paper, you can just go on [issuu.com] and present it online, not actually printed.”

Teachers can also work with students to share quality content on Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube, Nichols tells me, adding that students are putting themselves out there whether we’re paying for it or not. “We might as well work together for a really educationally sound experience with some training and some resources to do it their way,” she said.

Anecdotally, I’ve also heard from colleagues at peer schools who argue that even with minimal or no publication costs, they wouldn’t be able to find and hire a person to teach and advise student media, without needing that individual to also teach other courses. My reply is that if schools can hire and pay for athletic coaches, as well as help to oversee other auxiliary programming, they can also hire and pay somebody to oversee student media initiatives. It’s all about priorities, and I question any independent school that does not move mountains to support student media.

It’s also worth noting that many new journalism teachers lack experience. Many helpful and affordable resources exist (which I explain later on). All that needs to happen is for schools to place an adult in the room. All the same, students should assume as much of the responsibility as possible. Now, five years into advising The Gator, I’m practically invisible. What readers see online is entirely student produced, even as I stick around if students request help editing, or want my thoughts on ethical considerations.

Curious about how often schools look to hire journalism teachers, I reached out to Carney Sandoe & Associates, the largest teacher-placement organization in the independent school world. According to Director of Communications Julie Landis, in the past decade, only a handful of journalism jobs have been listed with the company each year. “In our opinion, a job like that is often not listed externally,” Landis wrote me via an electronic exchange. “Instead, a current English teacher might take on such a role, so we might not see the full picture. It is indeed still quite a small number.”

There is nothing wrong with an existing hire also taking on a journalism position, even if that individual lacks experience in the subject. Even so, when it comes to assessing the priority of student media at independent schools, I’m not comforted by what Landis shared with me; quite the opposite.

It Doesn’t Align with Our Mission

Even if money did pose a legitimate barrier to schools’ launching successful journalism programs, which it does not, I was even more shocked when Salkin told me that several schools she reached out to reported that student media programs don’t align with their missions.

“There are schools that don’t understand the valuable role that student publications can have in student development — in the development of voice, the development of identity, the ability to engage a public, to understand community issues,” Salkin said. “There is so much documented benefit to working on student press that, unless your mission is, ‘We don’t want to teach, and we want them to come out incredibly compliant,’ you cannot claim that you’re living by your mission statement.”

Salkin explained that her surveys of schools were anonymous, making it difficult for her to dig deeper into specific cases. In my anecdotal, less scientific experience, I can’t help but think that too many schools claim mission misalignment as an excuse for fear of being criticized by young journalists. Why else would schools fight against scholastic journalism, which caters so well to student agency while also cultivating an array of highly transferable communication skills?

Such fear is entirely misplaced, especially as independent schools emphasize the importance of community, and I can’t think of any successful community that doesn’t coexist with a thriving press, keeping its leaders honest and accountable.

“Transparency is really key,” Salkin tells me. “I think that people are more open to that now than ever, because they’re seeing other places without transparency. There’s an argument to be made that ‘you don’t trust us, or you don’t think this is how it is, let us show you. Let us put it all out there for you.’”

Even a quick glance at The Gator reveals overwhelmingly positive coverage, an impression that is justly deserved. In fact, before I wrote this essay, the National Scholastic Press Association (NSPA) published Expressing Ourselves, a featured piece about the School’s strong arts program, on a shortlist for Digital Story of the Year. However, student publication should not be a mere arm of the public relations office. My students don’t shy from controversy.

Gabe Bryan ’19 recently won NSPA’s Opinion Story-of-the-Year for Speak Truth to Power Amid Sexual Abuse Claims, an honor akin to a Pulitzer Prize in student journalism. He doesn’t pull any punches: “Something is rotten in America, and the stench is emanating from our political leaders and media elite, who either don’t know how or refuse to treat women with dignity and respect,” his lede reads. “Let’s start at the top.”

The Gator has also featured controversial stories about the immediate community, including a touchier but important piece last spring, Brimmer Not Immune to Vaping Trend. While reporting, students acted responsibly by speaking with administrators, who requested that the online publication neither identify nor provide pseudonyms for sources, worried about harming an individual’s potential prospects for the future. The editors agreed, and the story ran on the front page, where it became the most read article for over a month.

More recently, The Gator ran another critical story, Admin. Unveils Additional Midterm Policy Changes, which highlighted inconsistencies over the last three years. The editors, seeing that the administration felt uneasy about the piece, assured them that the article would be fair, balanced, and thorough. To assure administrators that this would be the case, the editors even made the decision to share the article with the head of school in advance. It’s important to note that students chose this course of action, and that the School never threatened to censor the piece. In the end, the story appeared without a storm — or at least one that I’m aware of. The students kept the community informed on an issue of major substance, and they felt proud about holding the School’s proverbial feet to the fire.

At times, The Gator is also critical of School policies in its opinion pages. Last spring, Camille Cherney won a local scholastic journalism award for her piece, It’s Time to Rethink Graduating in White. One passage is worthy of quoting at length, as it exemplifies how scholastic journalism has the potential to foster eloquent and passionate writing:

As the end of the academic year quickly approaches, some students and faculty are questioning the strict dress code for graduation.

Since before the merger of the Brimmer School and the May School in 1939, female students have been required to wear white dresses to graduation.

The tradition was instituted long, long ago, and it’s time to examine the relevance of the dress-code. White is traditionally a symbol of virginity, innocence, and goodness. These traits are antiquated in a time when both women and men are defying gender stereotypes.

The color white also symbolizes marriage, implying that female graduates are ready to find a husband. Purity should not be idealized as an essential feminine quality. Instead, the School should encourage individuality and recognize that femininity can be expressed in many different ways.

Moreover, the dress code does not address the concerns of students who do not identify as a woman or a man. Some do not want to express themselves in a purely feminine or a purely masculine way.

It remains to be seen whether graduating seniors in 2019 will be able to wear non-white colors at commencement. But what’s clear is how much Brimmer supports student voice, even thoughtful, civil dissent. Whether because of or despite this reality, our Pre-K–12 community continues to flourish. In fact, we had completed a multi-million-dollar addition, featuring a high-tech science classroom, media center, Maker Space, and Innovation Center.

Lack of Student Interest

Brimmer’s impressive improvements to the physical plant have transformed our small school of just under 400 students. It’s worth noting that The Gator wrote an editorial praising those involved in the effort. Equally noteworthy, with an average of only 32 students in each high school grade, journalism is consistently one of the most popular electives and meets three times a week.

Last spring, 27 students in grades 9–12 enrolled in the class, which is dedicated to producing The Gator, making it the second most popular elective in the School, right behind chorus. This fall, to make things more manageable for our student-editors, we had no choice but to limit the class size to 18. When it gets down to it, all of this is to say that no matter the size of your school, scholastic journalism should exist, and thrive.

I was dismayed, then, when Nichols told me that a lack of student interest also dissuaded private schools from offering journalism, including the chance to work on a student newspaper. I cringed as she did her best to summarize her findings: “Our students are trying to do so many things that student media is just not on their radar, because they don’t see it as getting them into the elite colleges and universities. They would much rather do rocket club, or they would much rather do debate or student council — the things they feel are the big-money activities that are going to give them more recognition.”

If students don’t consider journalism a “big-money activity,” the independent school world is in deeper trouble than I originally thought. I trust Nichols’s research, but I refuse to believe that students actually feel this way. Nichols agrees, and we both feel that any assertion of a lack of student interest is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nichols puts it best: “‘Our students aren’t interested, so we won’t have a newspaper.’ We don’t have a newspaper, so how are students supposed to get interested in it?”

However, even if most students at a given school lack interest in journalism, schools have a responsibility to bring in teachers trained to instruct students in essential disciplines — like math and history. Of course, many students detest math and history, yet schools still require courses in those disciplines. I believe this is necessary and proper, as young people must be exposed to various methods of thinking.

We shouldn’t offer excuses for not having a vibrant culture of student media in our schools. If we know that something with documented benefit to students, like math and history, is required of students, regardless of interest or proficiency, there is no excuse for not making journalism at least an option.

Help Is Available

If you don’t know where to start in fostering student media in your school, the best place to look is the JEA. Nichols tells me that her organization wants to be your partner every step of the way. This includes training teachers to become journalism advisers. The organization also offers a mentorship program, as well as an entire sample curriculum for journalism education. As Nichols puts it,

Any truly good administrator is a teacher, and any truly good teacher understands how kids learn, and who doesn’t want a kid to learn? Who doesn’t want a kid to be the decision-maker? Who doesn’t want a kid to have to grapple with these really tough choices, and to get it right and to be held accountable to this huge, huge audience and to a team of people working day in and day out to do good? We want to help you do it right. All you have to do is offer journalism.

I also suggest looking into joining your state scholastic journalism association, which can be found with a quick Google search. The Columbia Scholastic Press Association, as well as NSPA, in addition to offering terrific educational support, gives annual national awards in virtually every category of scholastic journalism.

Lastly, ask schools with established journalism programs for free advice. Along those lines, don’t be afraid of contacting public schools with award-winning publications. I can’t express how much I’ve learned from more experienced advisers, no matter from what type of school.

Of course, I’m more than happy to help however I can. Ultimately, I aim to spearhead a group of private schools invested in supporting quality student journalism. I envision that this process will play a critical role in helping to guide private schools, which have concerns and questions unlike those of the public and charter school sectors, in launching successful campaigns in student journalism.

We should not wait to get started. I’m filled with excitement upon considering the untapped potential in our wider community. Let this be the start of something special.

Essay 6.2

If a School Won’t Support a Robust Student Newspaper, Don’t Trust It

November 25, 2025 · Age of Awareness (Medium)

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I advise an award-winning student newspaper at a small independent school. People keep telling me how “lucky” I am. They’re right — I am lucky. But that is exactly the problem.

I shouldn’t have to feel lucky to work at a school that trusts students with real journalism — where they can ask hard questions, publish uncomfortable truths, and put their names on work they truly own. That should be standard practice, not a rare privilege.

My role is not to rewrite their work. It is to sit beside students staring at a blank Google Doc and ask, “What is the real story here? Where is your tension? What is your evidence?” I push them to think harder, dig deeper, and own every word under their byline.

Once a week, I walk in with a big box of Dunkin’ Donuts. Not as a reward, but as a ritual — a reminder that we are in this together. We argue about edits, celebrate small wins, laugh when a headline completely whiffs, and then get back to work.

Visit The Gator

That is what it looks like to advise The Gator — and here is what makes me angry: after twenty years teaching in independent schools, and as a product of them myself, I know how rare this opportunity still is, especially at some of the most “prestigious” schools in New England that love to talk about student voice but have no real student press to show for it.

If You Don’t Support a Real Newspaper, You Don’t Support Student Voice

Glossy viewbooks and slick mission statements promise student voice, leadership, and agency. Schools love to talk about critical thinking and civic engagement.

But many of those same institutions, including some of the most established, brand-name schools in New England, either do not have a student newspaper at all or keep the one they have on a very short leash. A “publication” that runs a few safe pieces a year and never makes anyone uncomfortable is not a student press.

I am still stopping short of naming schools; I am not interested in public shaming.

But here is a directory of New England independent high schools, and I have spent a lot of time digging through it.

Browse the AISNE school directory

A few schools have strong publications, including some excellent print papers, but far too many lack real digital, public-facing journalism that is updated regularly and willing to publish uncomfortable truths. If you care about this, check a school’s website, see if it has a student publication, and, if it does, read enough to judge how real and independent it feels; that alone will tell you a lot about what the school actually values — or doesn’t.

That is why this matters. You can hang banners about “student leadership” all over campus and flood social media with “empowering” stories. None of that means much if students are not trusted to publish thoughtful, timely coverage, including pieces that make some people uncomfortable, under their own bylines.

A school that seems never to have controversies, debates, policy changes, or student concerns is not a school without problems. It is a school that does not trust its students — or its own ability to guide them — to do the hard, ethical work of responsible journalism.

As a parent, I would run, not walk, away from any independent school, or any school for that matter, that does not have a real student newsroom or is not clearly building one. To me, that is a bright, flashing sign that students are not trusted or empowered by the people in charge.

What Real Independent-School Journalism Looks Like

I work at a smaller independent school in the Boston area, where I advise one of the most decorated student news sites in the country. I’m proud of the awards, but I’m even prouder of the work.

Most of our coverage is positive — and that matters. We are a strong, caring community, and that’s newsworthy. Our reporters highlight major campaigns, people who rarely get attention, and the big athletic moments that define a season. Joy and progress deserve serious journalism, too.

Student reporting: Girls’ Varsity XC Win MBIL Championship

Keep clicking through our site and a different layer emerges.

You will find editorials pushing classmates to think about AI and integrity, and coverage explaining why AI “humanizers” are so tempting and what they jeopardize. You will see pieces on political discourse and core values, challenging the community to debate with respect and live up to what it says it stands for.

On the news side, students treat campus life as real news. They report on safety concerns, policy changes, facilities issues, and schedule decisions that affect how students live their days. They talk to administrators, students, and faculty and explain what has happened, why decisions were made, and how people are responding.

Student reporting: Academic Priorities Limit Club Meeting Periods

They also publish deeply personal and vulnerable work — a student writing about growing up with a stutter, an editor-in-chief reflecting on belonging and identity. In a more cautious school culture, those pieces might have been discouraged or sanitized. Instead, they live on our site.

Student reporting: Saying the Right Words: My Journey Through Stuttering

The Gator doesn’t choose between good news and hard news. It tells the truth about a community that is both special and, like any institution, not always perfect.

What Advising Actually Involves

Advising in this kind of newsroom is not about serving as the final censor or the school’s PR safety valve. It is about building a culture of responsibility and trust.

On any given day, my work includes asking, “Who is missing from this story?” when a draft leans too heavily on one source; saying, “Show me your notes,” and making sure quotes match what people actually said; and walking students through how to phrase a tough interview question to a dean or Head of School in a way that is firm but fair.

Related teaching resource: Ethical Decision-Making in Journalism

We talk openly about harm, privacy, and consent when they are writing about peers or vulnerable subjects. I push them to send one more follow-up email or knock on one more door instead of settling for the easy version of the story.

Then I step back. My job is to coach, not control. Student editors make final decisions about coverage and content, whether they are publishing a breaking story, a sensitive editorial, or a deeply personal feature.

The donuts help, too. Newsrooms can be intense places. Community matters. We need humor and small celebrations alongside tough conversations and deadline stress.

Too many independent schools seem terrified of that energy. They want the awards and the PR value but do not want to relinquish any real control.

The Prestige Problem

I have spent years trying to be the upbeat colleague in the independent-school world. I have offered to share curriculum, visit classes, talk to heads and boards, and help schools launch or revive publications. I have tried to model what is possible when a school actually trusts its students and faculty adviser.

Some schools have responded. Many more have not. And, tellingly, some of the least interested are those most obsessed with name recognition and brand management.

How can a school brag about student agency, leadership, and voice while operating without a real student newspaper?

If a school can afford a new AP course or a shiny building, it can afford to invest in student journalism. If it can underwrite turf fields and cutting-edge STEM labs, it can underwrite student voice.

Graduates who become lawyers, doctors, business leaders, policymakers, journalists, or teachers will need more than polished résumés. They need to understand how institutions work, what accountability looks like, and how to ask hard questions respectfully but directly. A student newsroom is one of the few places in a school where they can actually practice that.

Prestige without student journalism is not impressive. It’s hollow.

What Prospective Families Should Be Asking

As tuition climbs, families touring independent schools should ask very different questions.

Instead of stopping at “How many APs do you offer?” and “Where do your seniors go to college?” ask whether the school has a student newspaper, whether it is updated regularly, who gets the final say on content, and whether there are examples of students covering controversial or uncomfortable issues on campus.

Ask if students are free to write editorials about school policies, national politics, and cultural conflict, or if that kind of writing is quietly off-limits.

Student editorial: Prioritizing Respectful Political Discourse on Campus

If the answers are vague, defensive, or buried under jargon, that tells you plenty. If one school has a lively student paper full of honest, sometimes messy coverage and another has nothing but flawless marketing copy, I know which campus I trust more.

If a school does not trust its own students to live the values it advertises, that is a red flag.

I’m Done Pretending This Is Optional

I am deeply proud of what my students have built at The Gator: that they report the good news with care, lean into hard stories without flinching, and are brave enough to put their names on personal pieces that expose real vulnerability.

If your mission statement trumpets student voice, leadership, and agency, you owe your students a real newsroom — not just carefully curated publications, Instagram feeds, or brochures run through the advancement office. Those all have their place, but they can’t exist in a silo. They need to stand alongside an independent student press that asks tough questions and tells the fuller story of school life.

A real student newspaper is student-run and transparent. It is one of the best indicators of how well a school prepares students to communicate effectively and ethically, with a strong sense of responsibility.

If you do not support a thriving student newspaper, you do not support student voice. No amount of prestige, new APs, or capital projects can cover that up — and no prospective family should trust an independent school, even an established one, that pushes aside student publications. It’s as simple as that.

Essay 6.3

The Silent Censor: Why Student Journalists Are Putting Down the Pen

April 9, 2026 · Age of Awareness (Medium)

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Our democratic republic thrives on inquiry, yet today’s student journalists are increasingly choosing silence over scrutiny — a retreat that threatens the future of accountability in America.

I was recently honored with the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s Gold Key, its highest award for “outstanding devotion to the cause of the school press.” I take this recognition seriously. It gives me a platform, and I plan to use it, because what I see at these conventions is a generation of young journalists learning, right at the start of their careers, that the safest story is no story at all.

A high schooler in a New Voices state, where legislation offers greater protection for student journalists, recently shared his desire to cover local student walkouts protesting ICE activities in his community. However, he feels hesitant, fearing administrative backlash and potential consequences that could arise from drawing unwanted attention to his school amid the current political climate.

Another student at a private secular school wants to write an op-ed about being pro-life in her progressive community. She decides not to. Every article is reviewed before publication, and she already knows what the response will be.

A third student at a large urban public school in Texas is too afraid to write about his political views. He worries not only about what his classmates might think, but also about how teachers and college admissions officers might judge him if they look him up online.

There are many more stories just like these. And as somebody who often meets with student journalists and their advisers at local and national conventions, I’ve heard them all. Their stories are similar, and it’s worrying.

And yet, to be clear, student journalists are covering bold topics with bravery and exceptional skill. Just look at how young reporters have localized coverage of ICE in their own communities, including a powerful editorial from wlhsNOW, the student news site of West Linn High School in Oregon.

“ICE doesn’t have any place in schools, and it should stay that way,” the editorial board writes, not backing down.

Or consider The Life of Keith LaMar by Madilyn Shoop-Gardner and Caitlin Stehr of Scot Scoop, the student news publication of Carlmont High School in Belmont, California. The reporters do an exceptional job detailing the experiences of a death row inmate who maintains his innocence, using immersive digital storytelling, interactive graphics, and striking visuals to enhance the piece.

I was similarly struck by Laila Taraporevala’s story in The Standard, the American School in London’s student publication, “I’m not slim enough”: Athletic body stereotypes invade the student-athlete community.

Even with anonymous sources, its impact is undeniable. As one student says, “I’m constantly just looking in the mirror, not even to see how I’m playing. I’m just looking at how my stomach looks.”

At the same time, self-censorship — stories never pitched, opinions never written, and questions never asked — continues to weaken student press freedom from within.

Even students who know their rights, including in New Voices states, still hold back, telling me that they don’t want to upset anyone. They’re also focused on college applications, want support from teachers and administrators, and fear being seen as troublemakers.

When I suggest that colleges should reward student journalists who report content responsibly, too many students just smile and disagree. They have already thought it through, and in their calculus, the risks outweigh the benefits.

But having legal protection is not the same as feeling safe. A student might have every right to publish a story but still choose not to, because the law cannot shield them from other consequences they fear, whether real or imagined. The gap between what students are allowed to do and what they feel comfortable doing is where self-censorship happens. And that gap is large.

Students and their supporters have spent decades building legal protections for student press freedom. Now, we must focus on something harder to create with laws — a culture that helps students believe these protections are real, that their journalism matters, and that telling the truth carefully, ethically, and responsibly is always worth the risk.

To get there, adults in positions of power must affirm that, as long as students report ethically, they will be supported — even when their coverage isn’t always rosy. In some cases, they should even be celebrated. The alternative leaves students entering professional newsrooms afraid to hold power to account. That’s a scary proposition — one I will fight against with everything I have.

Until then, too often, the most powerful censor in any school isn’t necessarily a principal with a red pen. It’s the student who chooses to never pick up a pen at all.

Essay 6.4

Student Press and the Wake-Up Call for Private Schools

July 27, 2026 · Medium

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As Director of the Private School Journalism Association, I want to recognize the student editors of The Augur Bit, who submitted an essay to The Atlantic, for their courage in speaking up about the culture of student journalism at their independent school.

“We want our publication to be like a small-town newspaper, one that gives its readers a comprehensive view of how our community thinks and feels, and one that advances the cause of seeking the truth and reporting it,” write student journalists Jacob Blane, Annabelle Garland, and Sam Gross. “But our readers cannot get a full view of the community when people are too afraid to talk.”

A caveat first: The Atlantic piece, “The New Chilling Effect,” is one window into what happened, and we don’t know the full story of how student journalism is treated at the school. The standards we teach student journalists — get every side, minimize harm — apply to us too when we talk about each other’s schools. I hope this post is read in the spirit I intend: not as a final judgment of any one institution, but as a prompt for all of us.

Indeed, the underlying issue isn’t limited to one campus. The essay’s warning that “too many institutions are training kids to be silent” should give every independent school educator pause. These students wanted something any adviser would be proud of: a paper that honestly reflects its community and goes after the truth. By their own account, that became far harder than it should have been, because people were afraid to talk.

Wearing my multiple hats (as an online newspaper adviser, a history teacher, and the director of a national organization), I’ve heard the horror stories firsthand: students shut down for pursuing legitimate reporting, and advisers, some of whom have been fired or censured for standing up for student voice. This can’t be the norm. Just because private schools can legally censor and intimidate student journalists doesn’t mean they should.

And unlike their public-school peers, who increasingly have New Voices laws behind them, the vast majority of private school student journalists have no guaranteed rights at all. An administrator can kill a story for any reason, discipline the adviser, or shut the whole publication down. “Brand protection,” especially in more competitive areas, slides into quiet censorship more often than we’d like to admit. And the self-censorship it engenders in students is worse than spiking any single article: the real cost is the stories never pitched, the questions never asked, the sources who learn to stay quiet. More opportunities for student journalism should be available at our institutions, not fewer — especially if we wish to further distinguish ourselves from other types of schools.

We must walk the walk of our school mission statements, which often promise student leadership, communication, and agency. Families accept those promises when they enroll. A school that markets “student voice” and “critical thinking” but censors its newspaper, or makes community members feel unsafe sharing their views, is breaking that promise.

I know firsthand what the alternative looks like. Whatever recognition The Gator and I have earned belongs equally to my head of school, Judith Guild. She has backed the newsroom for 13 years, never flinching even when real journalism gave her headaches. This spring she signed PSJA’s Model Affirmation Statement — the first action of its kind by a head of school in New England — giving our student reporters protections equivalent to what New Voices laws provide public school students in Massachusetts. For that leadership in protecting student press freedom, the New England Scholastic Press Association honored her with its Freedom to Write Award.

An independent school’s health can’t be measured by enrollment, the donor base, the endowment, or the college list alone. It also reveals itself in how deeply a school trusts its students — and works to earn their trust in return — as responsible, ethical stewards of journalism. When members of a community feel silenced, that tells you something. As one of two recent recipients of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s Gold Key Award — given in recognition of devotion to the cause of the school press, encouragement of student editors, and support of the high ideals of scholastic journalism — I have a duty to elevate this issue beyond the walls of any single school.

I won’t render a final judgment here. But it says a lot that these students felt strongly enough to take their concerns to a national publication, and I hope the rest of us treat their courage as a reason to look hard at how we support student publications on our own campuses. When we trust our students, we don’t just avoid crises. We live up to what our schools claim to stand for.