A high school journalist, Ann Long, profiled three openly gay students for her school paper at Troy High School in Fullerton. According to the Los Angeles Times, school officials plan to fire her from her shared post as editor of the Oracle.

District and school officials did not object to the story’s content. The district is firing Long, 18, for violating the ethical standards of the journalism class and a state education code that prohibits asking students about their sexuality without parental permission.

Long had violated the section of the California education code that requires written parental permission before asking students questions about their or their parents’ “personal beliefs or practices in sex, family life, morality and religion,” as the code states.

The state education code they refer to is one, dealing with “sex education” and prohibits schools from asking students about sexual practices without parental permission. However, the statute was never intended to apply to school students.

“I don’t think I’ve done anything that merits me stepping down,” said Long, who vowed not to surrender her position, to the Los Angeles Times. “Perhaps I should have called the parents to interview them for the story, but I don’t feel like I should have been obligated to get their permission to write it. These students chose to talk to me.”

In the Dec. 17 issue, the article chronicles the decisions of three students – two 18 and one 15-year-old – to reveal their homosexuality and bisexuality to family and friends. All three spoke to Long knowing their names would be used.

According to Long, her journalism teacher, Georgette Cerrutti, worked closely with her on drafts of the article for more than a month, at one point discussing with her the impact it might have on the students’ families.

Long said Cerrutti never told her she needed to get the parents’ approval.

Experts on the rights of student journalists said the district was wrong to apply that part of the education code to a student.

“The school has no right to punish this student,” said lawyer Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va., to the Times. “A student has the right to talk about their private life, and a student journalist has the right to report on it. Ultimately, there are some things that are not within a school’s right to control.”

Doug Mirell, a First Amendment lawyer in Los Angeles, said that because minors legally could not waive their right to privacy in discussing matters such as sexual orientation, journalists must get a parent’s permission. Mirell said it would be up to a parent, and not a school, to complain about the privacy breach.

But parental consent seems absurd. It doesn’t make a great deal of sense to require parental consent to interview a student for a school but then not require parental consent for a student’s abortion or treatment for a variety of sexually transmitted diseases.

I don’t think there is a privacy question here when dealing with openly gay students. Years ago a gay man saved the life of a former president. He sued a San Francisco paper for outing him, but the court concluded his sexual orientation was hardly private because everyone knew he was gay.

Openly gay students are like students of an ethnic or religious minority. Journalists don’t have to get parental permission to interview the African-American or Muslim student(s) at school.

Nationally, high school journalists all over the country are victims of censorship. Ironically, many of the cases involve stories discussing gay students.

Unfortunately, a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court gave school officials the power to censor school papers so long as there is some educationally-related reason for censoring the article.

Another example is Hazelwood v. Kohlmeier, which involved a paper dealing with teen pregnancy and the effects of divorce on students in a Missouri school district. School officials felt the story invaded student and parental privacy and therefore censored the article. The Supreme Court upheld the action, holding that a school paper is part of the school curriculum. The school could rationally determine, said the court, that the articles in question could be harmful to the subjects of the articles or their families.

By virtue of the Hazelwood case, high school papers have become little more than house organs, spinmasters or spokesholes for school administrators.

By contrast, California still gives high school journalists more rights. School officials may only censor a school paper when articles are “legally libelous or obscene” or when articles violate “lawful school regulations.”

Before the school can censor the article, the school has to get a court ruling that the article(s) does, in fact, violate the law.

California law also provides that students may not be punished for exercising First Amendment rights that they would have off campus. In other words, had Long simply posted the article on her website, the school could not have taken any action against her.

By virtue of that, she cannot be punished for what she does on campus.