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.
Comments
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Confrontation (anonymous) says…
Parkay is obviously ashamed of her big "V". Don't worry. I'm sure someone out there will find yours attractive. Perhaps another right-wing sociopath who posts on this site.
RETICENT_IRREVERENT (Ronaldo Ignacio) says…
All this hoohoo talk makes me blush.
Just stop it!
beatrice (anonymous) says…
cool, its called the vulva. That is the actual term for the bits on the outside.
It seems like the editor is just acting like a boob.
AaronPye (anonymous) says…
Having graduated from this very school I am not surprised that the administration has nothing better to do than censur the students. Typical waste of tax dollars to publish an issue and then recall it. I spose all other issues on campus have been corrected and the administration had nothing better to do than to squash student rights.
Sad to see little has changed in the past 20 years, 22 years ago an issue was pulled from the racks because there was a cartoon of the principal called Big Bird.. Days later the issue was released after the school was warned about censorship of the press. They should have remembered this on Thursday.
denak (anonymous) says…
Having seen the Vagina Monologues twice, once with my adolscent son in attendance, I would encourage anyone to go see this play. This play is NOT anti-male nor does it promote abortion or sodomy or any other nonsense some people seem to spout.
This play is a play that you would want to see many times over since it changes from time to time to include current events. For those who oppose it, go see the play for no other reason than to see the scene involving a Kosova victim of rape.
This production raises awareness of female sexuality in all of its form and how throught the good, bad and the ugly, it can be effected.
Dena
anon99 (anonymous) says…
I must say, as an educator from another country the shocking thing about this article was not the vagina themed issue ( which, lets face it, would always be controversial), but the fact that there are 3,700 students in this school! To all those out there that see this as acceptable, forgive this ignorance to how things are done in the states, but this is seriously going to have an impact on both student performance, classroom management and behaviour. It would be naive to believe otherwise.