Los Angeles ? Grover Cleveland High School Principal Bob Marks has his limits.

On Thursday, it was the illustration of a vagina splashed across the front page of the student newspaper on Valentine’s Day.

Teachers rushed to confiscate the issue, but with some copies already in circulation and the campus in the city’s San Fernando Valley area in an uproar, it quickly became a hot read for the school’s roughly 3,700 students.

Some of the contraband issues made their way home, getting a quick reaction from parents.

“My phone’s been ringing off the hook,” Marks said. Only one parent, he said, asked why the paper was taken away. The others called to say they were offended, he said.

The drawing in question ran under the hot pink headline “Have a happy Vagina Day!” and the four-page edition included stories titled “Ending shame for nature’s gift” and “Rejected!!!!!!!”

The paper’s editor-in-chief, 15-year-old Richard Edmond, said he was trying to raise awareness of violence against women with a lead story about the “Vagina Monologues.”

Edmond said administrators did not explain to his satisfaction why this copy of Le Sabre was unfit for distribution. He said he was told by administrators: “This is not in the taste of the school; this is a high school, not Hollywood Boulevard.”

Students in California are ones in seven states with special laws protecting their rights to free expression in school, said Mike Hiestand, attorney and legal consultant to the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va. Typically, Hiestand said, students can publish whatever they like, as long as the speech is not unlawful or “seriously disruptive.”

Edmond wasn’t about to let administrators have the last word: After a flurry of overnight MySpace bulletins, he and some other students showed up at school Friday in homemade white, black and pink T-shirts reading “My vagina is obscene.” Similar fliers were taped to backpacks and posted around school. When Edmond, who describes himself as a community activist, and two other protesters refused to change their clothes, Marks sent them home.