Lawsuit Settled Over Censorship of Story About Sexual Orientation

LOS ANGELES - A Kern County judge is expected to issue a court order today that will ensure that Bakersfield high school students are not wrongly censored and that student free speech rights in the Kern School District are preserved.The final step comes a year and a half after the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the ACLU’s national Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Project, and the law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP filed a lawsuit after student journalists and their interview subjects were prohibited from publishing a series in the East High student newspaper, The Kernal, about sexual orientation and gender identity. East High School is part of the Kern School District in Bakersfield.

“This is a momentous day,” said Christine Sun, the ACLU of Southern California attorney who represented the six students and their co-plaintiff, the Gay-Straight Alliance Network, throughout the fight. “From day one the students knew they had been wrongly censored and vowed to make sure this didn’t happen to the next generation of Kern students. Under this policy, the students would not have been censored in the first place.”

More after the jump…. Continue reading ‘California High School Journalists Win Free Speech Victory’

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