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District 150 ducks discussion on shameful censorshop of Richwoods student newspaper

District 150 reclassified four principals yesterday.

To which I say: Who cares? Principals are entry management. They deserve to be beaten about the head and shoulders with long sticks.   Hey, I wish them well, but in the final analysis, screw them. They should have remained teachers if they wanted their jobs to stay protected.

What I wanted the board to discuss was the treatment Richwoods High School Principal Cindy Clark gave the staff of the student newspaper, the Shield. They censored the paper — actually pulled it off the shelves and reprinted it — minus an offending editorial and cartoon.

This was an editorial calling for — get this –stronger enforcement of the rules. Clark said it interfered with the school’s mission, which is, of course, complete bullshit. It made Clark look bad by pointing out that strong enforcement of the rules was NOT what students are getting at Richwoods.

And that distinction is important. School districts can censor student newspapers — when the student newspaper is about to publish stuff that interferes with the educational mission. That is SOOOOOOO not the case here. The editorial and cartoon supported the mission (apparently more than Clark is, apparently).

The board needs to get off its collective ass and order Clark to allow the cartoon be be printed. They they need to order Clark to pay for printing new copies of the paper. They Clark  needs to be punished in some embarrassing fashion. What is also true is that Richwoods needs a strong disciplinarian who WILL enforce the rules. And that person is NOT Cindy Clark.

And this needs to happen right now, because the editor is going to sue and take the district for a boat-load of money.

I’ll keep bringing up this topic until the board decides to do the right thing and un-censor the student newspaper. And apologize.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2012 at 2:26 am and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “District 150 ducks discussion on shameful censorshop of Richwoods student newspaper”

  1. Kathy Matlock says:
    April 5, 2012 at 12:44 pm

    Thank you so much for this post. I really want Cindy Clark to publicly state why in the world she censored this article and cartoon. She definitely has some explaining to do. Reading your post has prompted me to do what I should have done before. I will be emailing the board and ask that they or Cindy explain in plain English what was wrong with the article and the cartoon. Thank you.