Battle High School, located in Columbia MO, has been facing several difficulties in regards to their journalism department. The first being a new policy introduced this year, which affects the way their department can interview and publish photos.
“Our district has an opt out policy, which should not apply to student publications. But they are trying to force it on us. Our teacher actually has a list of student’s names [that aren’t allowed in the publications] and she can’t tell us any of them,” Jacei Bekah, 11, social media manager and previous editor and chief for Battle publications, said.
This policy makes it difficult in the interviewing and publishing process, forcing Bekah to do their due diligence when posting to social media.
“If there’s a picture with a student that is opted out in a photo, she can’t tell us who the student is. She just tells us we cannot use this photo, we don’t get to know what student it is, why. We just have to figure it out. So it makes it a lot harder. We don’t know who any of the students are,” Bekah said.
Similar to Stampede News, Battle High School has their own student-run website, the Spearhead; however, with a change in advisor and other factors, the website has been down for the duration of the year. This has made publishing content difficult for all staff, including Bekah.
“We have a website but it’s just been down all year, the Spearhead, and then the Spearhead newspaper also. We have a print that we give out at school and our stories also get published online, they’re just not accessible right now because our websites been down”
Part of the reason for the website being down is a change of advisors, Bekah has been attempting to get the website back up and running through the duration of the year.
“[The website being down] has been a big challenge for us this year because the advisor we had in the past had run journalism at Battle for many years. She also ran yearbook but now they split two different teachers. And so we definitely have transitioned from a teacher and advisor who recognized it was student run and let it be student run [to something more controlling],” Bekah said.
In regards to free press, the policy is an issue, one that they are attempting to pursue legally.
“We know [about the policy] because we’ve gotten contacted by the other high school editors as well at the beginning of the year. [We’re trying] to see what we could do about it because it is against the law to hold us to this opt out policy.”
Journalism is very important to Bekah, so having it restricted has been challenging. They shared why free press is so important as a student journalist.
“We actually get the truth, we know what issues are really affecting the students vs what the teachers think are affecting the students…it’s definitely nice to be student run and fully student led because we can get both sides of the story.”
