KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS NEWS Press for Success A STUDENT JOURNALIST IN DELTA COUNTY LEARNS SOME TOUGH LESSONS. BY CATIE CHESHIRE Eighteen-year-old Travis Cantonwine is the editor-in-chief of the Delta Paw Print, the student news publication at Delta High School. He hopes to become a professional journalist after he fi nishes college, which he’ll start in the fall at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs — but he’s al- ready learned some tough lessons about the news industry. He got into the newspaper business be- cause he wanted to be heard...but when it looked like the school district might start censoring the student paper, he silenced it until offi cials backed off. In 2019, the Colorado Legislature passed a bill requiring schools that wanted to re- ceive funds from the Comprehensive Human Sexuality Education grant program to imple- ment a sex-education curriculum that did not emphasize abstinence as the primary form of preventing pregnancy and didn’t use stigma- tizing language when teaching about gender stereotypes, sexuality or transgender people — if schools chose to discuss those subjects. In the spring of 2021, the impacts of that bill became clear in Delta County when the school district proposed a curriculum that adopted some of the new, more comprehen- sive measures. Worried that their children would learn more about sexuality than they wanted them to, some parents protested even as local LGBTQ groups rallied in support of the proposal. Eventually, the school board voted it down. That May, Cantonwine reported about the controversy in the Delta Paw Print and penned an opinion piece from his perspec- tive as an LGBTQ writer. The school didn’t like the column, he recalls. “There’s no real evidence I have to cor- roborate that it’s a direct response to that article, but immediately after the article was posted, the [school] wanted to start putting a prior-review clause in our policy,” Can- tonwine says, adding that the school cited a district policy that allowed review of con- troversial articles by school administrators. He worked with the Student Press Law 10 Center over the summer and put the Paw Print on hiatus until the school board revised its policy to remove the threat of censorship. Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel for the SPLC, which is headquartered in Virginia, says Cantonwine is fortunate that he lives in Colorado. This is one of fi fteen states that has a student free expression law that protects stu- dent speech in public schools. “One of the fi rst questions I ask if somebody’s calling...is, ‘Where are you calling from?’ Because once they tell me that they’re from Colorado, usually the news is pretty good that at least the censorship part of it is probably not something that is le- gally supported, and we can usu- ally push back a bit on it because of Colorado’s law,” Hiestand says. That law was passed by the legislature in 1990, after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier decision, which gave student journalists much less freedom on a national level. Before that, the prevailing law was derived from Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Commu- nity School District and dictated that students had the right to make their own editorial deci- sions unless their speech was unlawful or would signifi cantly disrupt normal school activities. After Hazelwood, the bar for censorship got lower: Schools were given the discretion to censor speech if they had a reasonable edu- cational justifi cation. The problem is that schools can defi ne In 2020, Colorado’s stu- dent free-expression law was updated to protect advisors as well as students. According to Hiestand, SPLC had identifi ed a trend in which schools targeted advisors rather than students when they weren’t happy with student journalism, since stu- dents were explicitly protected by law but advisors weren’t; the update seems to have helped mitigate that problem. At Delta High School, that advisor is Kelly Johnson, who declined to comment for this story. Despite Colorado’s rela- tively strong protections for student journalists, Hiestand says cases in the state still come up a few times a year because turnover among students is naturally high. Even a student who works for a school publica- tion all through high school is still gone after four years, and many students don’t get into student journalism right away. The Delta Paw Print editor-in-chief pushed for autonomy...and won. “reasonable” however they want, Hiestand points out. “If school offi cials can censor something simply by saying that it’s poorly written or inconsistent with the shared values of a civilized social order, you kind of fl ush the First Amendment down the toilet,” he says. “It’s not a very high bar.” Fortunately for students in Colorado, the legislature agreed with Hiestand and essentially enshrined the level of protection that Tinker had given students into state law. Hiestand started the SPLC in 1989 after the Hazelwood decision; in its fi rst few years, the organization received about 500 calls each year asking for help, he recalls. Ten years later, it reached its peak, with 2,500 requests for help annually. Now that number is lower, though there are still enough calls to keep the center busy. “We saw an enormous jump in the amount of censorship taking place and the type of censorship taking place,” Hiestand says. “Many student media programs, par- ticularly in states where they didn’t have state legal protection, just disappeared.” That’s not the case in Colorado, which Hiestand says still has a fl ourishing student journalism network in its public schools — though it’s still legal for school administra- tors to read student publications before they go to press as long as they don’t intervene in the contents. That’s what concerned Can- tonwine. Hiestand says he urges students to at least try to make the case that such prior review is a bad journalistic and educational practice, and the Delta County School Dis- trict seems to have listened to that argument. Last fall, the district amended the policy to allow only the newspaper advisor to review student work before publication, not admin- istrators. Kurt Clay, assistant superintendent for the Delta County School District, says the change was prompted by Cantonwine’s article, and maintains that student journalists who write controversial stories, rather than school offi cials, have ownership of those stories. With that ownership established, the Paw Print began publishing again in November. “It’s the freedom to make the decisions, but it’s also that responsibility for making those decisions,” Hiestand says. “If a student editor knows that he or she is on the hook for making particular decisions, they’re gonna put some thought into that in ways that they might not otherwise do. I’m delighted to hear that the school offi cials, who often aren’t so willing to listen to those sorts of arguments... were willing to do so in this case. It really does make a difference.” That was certainly the case for Travis Cantonwine. Now set to graduate on May 22, he only got into journalism at the start of the 2020-21 school year and was selected as editor-in-chief, despite his relatively new status on staff, because he’s one of the few students who plan to pursue journalism as a career. He started out with a splash, writing about Decolonizing Delta County School District. In 2020, former Delta County high- schoolers Marisa Edmondson and Jordan Evans, both women of color, founded De- colonizing Delta County School District and sent a letter to the district describing how it could be more inclusive and better support students of color. Their ideas included a suggested reading list of authors of color. Dennis Anderson works for Wick Com- munications as the publisher of the Delta County Independent and the Montrose Daily Press. He’s also the publisher of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman in Wasilla, Alaska, and oversees all Wick operations in Alaska. Al- though Anderson says he doesn’t make any editorial decisions for the papers for which he’s responsible, he occasionally writes col- umns for them, including a September 2020 piece about Decolonizing Delta County School District that took issue with the organization’s suggestions for which books teachers should read to students. Ander- son wrote that it reminded him of banning certain books; he didn’t approve of shaping school curricula with either method. continued on page 12 MAY 12-18, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com COURTESY TRAVIS CANTONWINE
