The following is the text of a statement read by former Lowell High School (San Francisco) journalism adviser Katharine Swan in support of the Journalism Teacher Protection Act. Swan was speaking at a Feb. 19, 2008, press conference organized by the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco:

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As a former high school journalism advisor with 35 years of experience teaching in San Francisco public schools, I fully support a law increasing job protection for journalism teachers.

When I first began teaching and advising a school newspaper at Mission High, the California State Education Code attempted to provide high school students and their journalism teachers protection so that school publications might “provide a full opportunity for students to inquire, question and exchange ideas” without prior restraint.

The Code enabled my students to investigate and write challenging stories and to experience the power that those stories did and did not have for change. Early in my career a freshman editor was invited to sail on a Navy destroyer, and he wrote a balanced article describing the voyage in detail. First the printer and then the Navy attempted to censor the article. It was printed. A few years later, a student discovered the school athletic director was receiving money for intramural sports and that none were taking place. That story printed; the director filed a $350,000 lawsuit; the following year the school had a new athletic director.

During my first 25 years as an advisor, five principals understood the importance of a free press in a high school and supported students and the paper. However, the sixth attempted unsuccessfully to establish prior review so that he could censor articles he found unacceptable. It was a very challenging year, but my students rose to the occasion and covered events at the school: The attempted firing of San Francisco’s first African American coach in the middle of a game — the principal’s purchase of basketball shoes for boys and not for girls — the formal evaluation failing some administrative staff members by the faculty — and many, many more. Faculty members voted to allow reporters to sit in on a faculty meeting. When students won the very first Edmund J. Sullivan Award for “extraordinary idealism, resilience and pragmatism while trying to serve students in their audiences,” my fellow teachers were in the forefront helping to raise $19,000 in less than two weeks so that the staff could go to New York City, attend the Columbia Scholastic Press Association national student high school journalism convention and receive the award.

Other awards followed: A ‘Laurel’ from the Columbia Journalism Review, a $5,000 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award for Print Journalism and the James A. Madison Award. However, awards were not enough to save journalism at Mission. Under the Code, I couldn’t be fired, but the school could be reconstituted and I was reassigned. Today the school no longer has journalism classes or a monthly paper. Only an after class club exists which may or may not produce a single paper by the end of this year.

For the next eight years I worked as journalism adviser and English teacher at Lowell High, where my students continued to produce a powerful, controversial student newspaper that was consistently ranked one of the best in the country. One of the many controversial articles documented the former superintendent’s use of a gag order to attempt to control the press. Certainly Commissioner Mar will remember the cartoon of the superintendent attempting to gag him.

But when I retired in 2006, times changed. A new principal, critical of the paper, spent the year working to decimate the program by cutting Journalism 1 from the schedule and eliminating periods that students could enroll in the program to work in the journalism room. As a result the staff is shrinking and both advisors are rethinking their commitment teach journalism and advise the paper.

I believe that the Code no longer provides adequate protection for high school journalism teachers and students and that Senate Bill 1370 is sorely needed.