Schools

We are deeply concerned about the recent decision to suspend three students from Grover Cleveland High School because they wore homemade t-shirts which read, “My Vagina is Obscene,” to protest the censorship of the school newspaper Le Sabre.  We understand that the school paper was confiscated because it featured a detailed diagram of a vagina and accompanying articles about “V-Day”, a national movement to raise awareness about violence toward women.  In our view, both in censoring the school paper and suspending sophomore Richard Edmond and two of his peers for wearing these t-shirts, you have violated the students’ basic First Amendment and state free speech rights.

UPDATE:April 22nd, 2006: after winning a restraining order in federal court — so that administrators at Coral Academy of Science could not prevent him from reciting the poem of his choice — Jacob Behymer-Smith won 2nd place in the Nevada state finals of the "Poetry Out Loud" contest with his recitation of W.H. Auden's "The More Loving One." His performance [...]

Dear Commissioner Mills, Chancellor Bennett, Senator Kuhl, and Assemblyman Sanders: We have previously written to object to the routine censorship of literary passages on New York State English Language Arts Regents exams, which is questionable on pedagogical, intellectual and legal grounds. In our earlier correspondence, we documented numerous examples in which material was deleted apparently to eliminate any reference to [...]