On September 6th, 2001, fourteen year-old Corey H died. He killed himself with a butcher knife in his home in Turket, PA. His death hardly affected the small town of Boiling Turket. The only talks of Corey H were murmurs of high school students, gossiping about the circumstances behind his death. .
As journalists shaken by the death of one of our peers, my high school newspaper staff wanted to write about Corey's death and follow up with an article about teen suicide. The administration decided that we could not, under any circumstances, write anything about him in the paper. We were furious, because all that we intended to do was to write about our feelings of loss and pain, about how sad it was that he was gone after having taken his own life. We wanted to expose the issue of teenage suicide in what we felt was a safe, public manner. From the school's perspective, we were advocating it by putting it in the written word. This argument about censorship between students and administrations had been going on for ages.
For high school journalists, censorship has long been inevitable. For decades, high school administrations across the country have been attempting to control what students read, write, and say. In an effort to protect young people from risqué, violent and controversial social opinions, administrators have censored high school newspapers, yearbooks, and television media. In addition to the censorship of high school produced media, schools have gone so far as to ban books that are seen to be of a contentious nature. This kind of censorship is controversial because there is a question of whether administrators have the right to overrule the 1st amendment of the constitution in order to protect minors. .
Censorship, by definition, is suppressing anything objectionable, meaning subject matter considered to be inappropriate. Schools tend to redefine this as subject matter considered to be inappropriate for school aged people and subject matter distracting to the learning environment.