On May 13, 1983, high school student Cathy Kuhlmeier, a member of Hazelwood School District’s newspaper, The Spectrum, was censored. Kuhlmeier and her friends’ articles about teen pregnancy, the impacts of divorce on teenagers’ lives and runaways were removed from the publication by the principal of the school, Robert Reynolds.

According to Kuhlmeier, Reynolds attempted to justify the censorship by claiming that the reporters were using the actual names of the pregnant students and that he wanted to protect the girls. However, Reynolds wouldn’t know this information because he never read the articles.

Kuhlmeier explained that she and the students working on the article not only used pseudonyms to protect the students but also obtained signed consent from the students and their parents to discuss their stories, thus adhering to professional journalistic ethics.

“I think that a lot of it was because our principal was a new principal and he was trying to protect the school from letting the community know we had pregnant girls in our high school,” Kuhlmeier said. “He didn’t want anyone outside the walls of Hazelwood to know that girls were pregnant in this school.”

After the censorship, Kuhlmeier called her previous adviser, Mr. Sturgis, who was present for the beginning of the project. He told her to call the American Civil Liberties Union. When the ACLU expressed its interest in talking to Kuhlmeier and the other students, they went to visit the organization. From there, the case was carried up to the Supreme Court.

On Jan. 13, 1988, the case was closed and the Court ruled in favor of Hazelwood, saying that schools have the right to censor publications if their work is deemed “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”

“We just wanted to tell other kids about the problems in our school and maybe ways that they could avoid the pitfall of becoming like some of those that we talked to,” Kuhlmeier said. “…as a journalist, when you write stories, you know that every article you write isn’t going to make a difference to everybody. If you make a difference to one person, you’ve done your job, and that’s what it was all about.”

Although the immediate effects of Kuhlmeier’s case weren’t positive, its long-term impact allowed for important protections to blossom. An example of this being New Voices.

News deserts are rural communities with little to no access to credible and comprehensive local news and information that fuels democracy. The Local News Initiative reports that 40% of local newspapers, including school publications, have disappeared since 2005.

In 2003, Ellen Austin — a successful high school journalism adviser, Kent State University journalism professor and Journalism Education Association award winner — started The Rubicon, a newspaper publication at the small, rural St. Paul Academy. This paper provided more news than what the local publications were producing.

Despite its service to the community, the school’s Board of Education challenged The Rubicon for its writing. The student editors, along with Austin and a professional journalist from Minneapolis, stood together to fight against the BOE.

“If you have no professional news organizations near you, it puts on your young shoulders a real responsibility,” Austin said. “If people are going to find out what’s happening where you are, it’s on you and your colleagues. You are actually providing a great community service.”

Although it was ‘only’ a high school publication, its censorship would reach beyond the school. The community’s local news coverage would suffer a detrimental loss of important information.

“Local news is like the river that runs through a community and it brings information to everyone, and everyone can dip into it equally,” Austin said.

For local Del Val communities, such as Alexandria, Holland and Kingwood townships, as well as Frenchtown and Milford boroughs, The Delphi is the only organized news source consistently reporting on this community since the Hunterdon County Democrat ceased publishing. While The Delphi covers important Del Val and community news, it’s impossible for one paper to cover everything.

“The decisions that affect what happens to you from morning to night is actually not being made at the high school; it’s being made at the city council in budget meetings,” Austin said. “If you don’t know what’s happening there, that means that everybody in your high school is in a news blackout about things that could be really important for them to know.”

Without student publications, it is impossible to know what is happening in a community that lacks professional news sources. As a New Voices state, New Jersey protects student journalists from being censored, but what happens in to the University of Alabama community with no New Voices laws to protect its student journalists?

It is imperative that states lacking New Voices legislation adopt it. If a community of people is not aware of the choices being made within the town, important pieces of a story are left unheard, which causes democracy to fail.