Jones College Prep

Despite technically being protected by the First Amendment, the administration at Jones has still requested that certain articles be withheld from publication. “That’s been an issue because it’s hard to figure out what’s a censorship issue or if it’s just the administration protecting their image,” Lawrence said. “It’s been something that we’ve had to grapple with as journalists—we want to talk about truth and the news that’s happening, but we’re being funded by an administration who could take that away, so we do have to listen to them.”

As with other schools, when staff members at Jones are reporting on what could be considered a controversial topic, teachers often ask to see articles before they are published. “We’ve had to say, ‘Look, that’s not really how we do things here, and that’s not a standard practice we take part in,’” Lawrence said. “I think people get frustrated, but that’s just not something we want to do to maintain credibility as a newspaper.”

Lawrence and the rest of the staff recognize that there are some instances in which they as students don’t have the right to report on a story. “I know that we do try to not report on incidents that happen with students specifically,” Lawrence said. “We’ve had two incidents at our school in the last three years of students saying the n-word on social media, and they’ve both been suspended. The time it happened this year it was pretty awful, the whole school knew about it, and there was an announcement, and there was an email sent out to everyone. So everyone was pretty aware of it, and we all felt that it was an issue that needed to be addressed, but we didn’t feel we had the right to cover this story when it was one student that said it. It was kind of a privacy issue and an ethics thing.”