For more than 40 years, student journalists at Westside High School in Omaha have earned the reputation for producing independent, award-winning journalism about their community. But in 2020, the school district began to enforce prior review for the first time, assigning an administrator to review every article before publication. 

The administrators stated that school-sponsored student publications are not public forums, according to Westside Community School District’s policy 5470. Since the 70s, the school board’s policy has been that school publications are not public forums and that the school may “prevent or restrict publication and production.” But all Westside Publications had been acting as public forums for student expression by practice up until this year. While the district did not explicitly create a new school board policy to “handle student journalists” this school year, they did make the choice to begin enforcing a policy which hadn’t been used, in regards to student journalism, in almost half a century.

The Westside Journalism ethical guidelines and conduct explicitly states that “it is the responsibility of [Westside] publications to cover school, city, state, national and international events and issues that affect or concern the campus, its students or its readers in a non bias method.” This means that even without prior review, the kind of inflammatory content feared by administrators is not allowed to be published in any Westside Journalism publications.

Westside Journalism has and will continue to follow ethical journalism standards in regards to writing, editing, producing, and publishing content for its publications. However, prior review, and in turn Policy 5470, is harming the program’s ability to do that. If Westside Administration truly cares about their award-winning journalism department, they would allow it to publish content as a public forum for student expression, like it has been for the past 47 years, following journalistic standards and holding itself accountable.