Burlington, CT – Free speech poster child Avery Doninger graduated from Burlington's Lewis Mills High School, Friday June 20, but Principal Karissa Niehoff apparently continues to flex the authoritarian grasp of the school on the internet ether.

 

In a stuffy, hot packed gymnasium, among the flower print dresses, the high heels, and the state cops with the german sheperd, Doninger's conspicuous absence from the program as class secretary seemed small compared to the privacy concerns that loomed large, especially in the minds of parents like John Talarski.

 

Talarski watched one of his daughters graduate with Doninger, while he has another heading to Mills as a ninth grader in the fall.

 

He lamented the lack of privacy students have. He said sometime in the past two weeks, Niehoff caught wind that students published pictures on the social networking site of themselves drinking alcohol. Talarski claimed Niehoff sent letters home to students, and those kids got punished.

 

"It's absurd," Talarski said. "Somebody got into Facebook. It's another episode where kids are drinking, but they opened it to the school. Someone turned in names."

 

The comparison with Doninger's situation is easy. Former superintendent Paula Schwartz's son googled his mom's name in Spring 2007, and discovered that Doninger called central office administrators "douchebags" on her website. Niehoff punished Doninger by removing her name from the ballot for class Secretary. Doninger won a write-in campaign, and Niehoff suppressed those votes.

 

Doninger sued for an injunction to be class secretary, the perk of which was giving an address at graduation. She lost in the Second District Federal Court of Appeals in New York City in May. The judges said the Niehoff could reasonably forecast that Doninger's comments would result in a material disruption of class. Doninger's separate First Amendment claim for damages will go to a full trial.

 

Shortly after Niehoff's court victory, Neihoff's boss, Region 10 Superintendent Alan Beitman, suspended Niehoff because she wrote e-mails to complete strangers revealing undocumented and unsubstantiated allegations about Doninger, in violation of federal privacy laws.

 

Annie Nodwell, a long-time Burlington resident who sent daughters to Lewis Mills and Friday night sat in the stands waiting to watch her granddaughter graduate, said she normally trusts the federal courts. But after seeing them back the principal over the student, then to have the principal get punished is difficult.

Read more, and See Principal Niehoff Stare Down Avery...

 

A high school-themed column containing reasons I find for hope and disdain about the future.

 

Hope: That a former Echoes from the Streets’ student who called me the other night, asking for help, but needed to meet me in person because she feared talking about it on the phone, makes the right choice.

 

Disdain: That she even got herself into the situation she is in. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write about it in the future. Trust me when I say it’s a doozy.

 

Hope: Listening to arguments at a moot court from future lawyers at Watertown High School last week, I said to myself, there are some smart kids navigating their way through the underfunded public education system.

 

The moot court gathered lawyers, principals, a judge and state representative Sean Williams to act as the Supreme Court, and students argued the Seattle Community Schools case about voluntary desegregation.

 

Our Supreme Court voted in favor of racial integration and diversity as a compelling interest in high school, whereas the real SCOTUS voted against it. Whatever the case, it was fun to watch students ably approach difficult Constitutional law concepts.

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Life is change. We can embrace it. We can ignore it to our detriment. Or we can question it in the hopes that we can alter its inevitable march.

 

When pondering the changes proposed by the Quinnipiac University administration for the Chronicle, I want to see the proposals as fruitful and courageous, but I see the changes more as an abdication of duty.

 

The University has proffered a seemingly rational plan to cut the Chronicle free of its institutional support. This way, the Chronicle can finance itself and join as a full-fledged member the venerable Fourth Estate, with all the obligations attendant the First Amendment.

 

The exact funding mechanism is a bit of a mystery, but the University is giving itself more than a year to confront the budgetary concerns and logistics of the divorce.

 

QU won't send the Chronicle out into the big bad world by itself. If QU severs all fiduciary ties with the Chronicle, and then this 79-year-old student paper fails, the Bobcat will wear egg on its face.

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Hartford native Elizabeth Torres is a solid human being. She is a survivor, and she is only a college student, attending Central Connecticut State University. She is a journalist and an activist.

 

I’ve known Elizabeth since 2002. And last spring, I was eating lunch with my mom and my niece at a restaurant in Watertown when Elizabeth called my cell phone.

 

She could barely contain her outrage with the “satire” rape story in the CCSU weekly newspaper the Recorder. She wanted the editor fired, and she was passionate about justice here.

 

We discussed how the staff at Echoes from the Streets, where Elizabeth and I worked together, might have handled the problem of printing stories like that one. She calmed down, and looked for a more reasonable, than emotional approach.

 

Editor Mark Rowan stayed on. But I am sure Elizabeth’s Boricua blood is boiling right now over the cartoon that Rowan and the Recorder just published that suggests sexually abusing a kidnapped pre-pubescent Latina.

 

Since I am in Bermuda right now, I can’t phone up Elizabeth and ask her what she thinks of the cartoon. If I know Elizabeth, though, she is at the front lines of the controversy. And I hope she has less mercy on the editor now than I counseled her to have back in the spring.

 

Clearly, as far as student journalism goes, the CCSU Recorder is stirring the pot, but in the wrong way. I read at CTLocalPolitics.com that the problem is not just bad editorial judgment, but a recruiting issue.

 

The Recorder can’t find good students to work for it, the argument goes, so it relies on “less talented” students to fill space, and thus the stupid stuff gets into print.

 

Yes, staffs are thin at college papers, what with students having to work six jobs to pay for their education. But the recruiting issue at the Recorder is a symptom of the larger problem with scholastic journalism: lack of support and vision for the school news missions at all levels of education in state.

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Hartford drew the short end of the stick in its sister city relationship with New Ross, County Wexford, Ireland, jested New Ross teenager Ciaran Lyng.

 

New Ross and its environs has maybe 27,000 people, Lyng said, compared to Hartford's 120,000.

 

"They're a small town, and we're a small city," said Hartford Town Clerk Dan Carey, who chairs the Hartford-New Ross sister city committee. "And a river runs through both of them."

 

Lyng was one of five Irish students from New Ross who spent July in Hartford as part of year-long festival commemorating the founding of New Ross in 1207.

 

New Ross is most famous for being the place where Patrick Kennedy, the great-grandfather of President John F. Kennedy, was born and emigrated from. In 1848, Patrick Kennedy set sail on the wooden ship Dunbrody, a replica of which sits docked on the river in New Ross.

 

The sister city relationship between Hartford and New Ross arose from this historical connection, according to Carey.

 

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Gov. M. Jodi Rell expressed legitimate concern about the medicinal marijuana bill's lack of a distribution apparatus, yet her veto demonstrated her inability to lead, considering that in some polls, 83 percent of the people hold that certain types of ill persons should be able to use marijuana.

 

Rather than suggest a solution that people obviously want, Gov. Rell went against the will of the people, and those who suffer from AIDS wasting syndrome, cancer or a host of other illness remain criminals as they attempt to appropriate their medicine, which is better than most pharmaceuticals.

 

Now if a high school student brings the above two paragraphs to school and distributes them, that child may now be punished by school authorities, thanks to the ruling handed down by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Monday afternoon in the Frederick v. Morse student free speech case from Alaska.

 

"We hold that schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use," Roberts wrote.

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Terry D'Italia, public relations officer for the Hartford Public Schools, wants us to send him story ideas for The Hartford Educator, a 16-page tabloid sponsored by Hartford Public Schools.

 

So, Terry, here goes.

 

For those not familiar with the quaint little paper - half in English, half in Spanish - it is yet another public relations vehicle from Eddie Perez's office that gives the school board chair yet another opportunity to weave his narrative on the taxpayer dime. Here is the .pdf.

 

The Spring 2007 issue (first edition of the second volume) features stories about the construction progress on Hartford Public High School, summer school, a new credit union at Bulkeley High School and parents who strengthen the school system, like Perez-supporter Sam Saylor.

 

Color photos grace the cover, and sharp black and white photos on the inside. Of course, one color image shows Mayor Eddie Perez giving the state champion girls high school basketball team from Bulkeley free tickets to the Big East Women's tournament back in March.

 

The Educator is a professionally produced, slick development tool that I can see fundraiser Kelvin Roldan carting to meetings with high level donors, in hopes that they will read the favorable stories and say, geez, Hartford has neat stuff going on, we should give them money.

 

But the stories are so tilted towards the Perez camp that anyone with half a brain would know they don't represent reality. For example, the story on HPHS construction ignores the problems that have plagued the project.

 

Or the cover feature "Summer School in the City" focuses on the mandatory kindergarten through grade three programs while neglecting mention of the fiasco about canceled programs for middle schools.

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This Sunday afternoon April 29 at Hartford Public High School, Mayor Eddie Perez will welcome the accreditation examiners from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, or NEASC.

NEASC placed the country's second oldest public high school on probation back in December 1997, when Perez was making his name at the Learning Corridor, and HPHS now has the chance to clear its historical name.

 

But this is not only a pass-fail exam for the Pub, it's for Mayor Perez, too. The buck has to stop with him, the self-anointed chairman of the board of education and the chairman of the school building committee.

 

After taking a 90-minute tour of HPHS Monday morning April 23, I met wonderful professionals who have dedicated their lives to serving students. But they are also deeply concerned with the present and future status of the edifice.

 

I also saw many, many construction problems that would give me pause if I were an inspector looking to certify the best educational practices at the Forest Street structure.

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As if Mayor Eddie Perez needed any more problems to weigh down his leadership of the school system, I just found this gem, which seems to have slipped under the local news radar:

"Schools in Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Conn., are among those lagging in keeping up with safety inspections and cleanliness reporting for student cafeterias, concludes a report issued by a watchdog group Tuesday [Jan. 30, 2007]."

WebMD reported on the study by the Center for Science and Public Interest, in which Hartford received the lowest score, 37, out of a possible 100. Hartford was ranked nine points lower than second-worst Washington, D.C. Top scorer Fort Worth, TX rated an 80.

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If wisdom prevails, the U.S. Supreme Court will not purchase the fallacy peddled by Kenneth W. Starr and the federal government that students have no right in schools to challenge the failed policy of drug prohibition.

Starr argued in front of the nine justices of the august Supreme Court Monday, March 19 that the educational mission of teaching students the dangers about illegal drugs outweighed a student's right to exercise the First Amendment.

As part of my law school education, and for the loyal readers of this column, I obtained a press pass and secured a front row seat in the hallowed Court chambers for the oral arguments of Frederick v. Morse.

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Forget any of the work that I have been doing. Kiri Davis, a high school student from Washington state, has produced a solid news documentary with great production values that puts the race issue back at the center of the debate.

Kiri interviews African-American teen women and they discuss the difference between being dark and light skinned black. The kicker, though, is the black and white doll test she conducts with black children, identical to the one done for Brown v Board of Education, the school desgregation lawsuit.

When 15 out of 21 black children choose the white doll as the nice one and the black doll as the one they don't want to play with in Kiri's documentary, we know we are still mired in racial issues.

This comes to me the same day Wendy Wallace of Poynter.org wrote a story about the Washington state legislature considering legislation to extend First Amendment protections to high school journalists. Right now, Supreme Court law limits the rights of high school journos.

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A stench of desperation now emanates from the second hall executive offices in City Hall.

I entered the hallowed halls at 555 Main Monday to pay taxes (a few days late – sorry, January was a topsy-turvy month – but I covered the interest), and the odor was unmistakable: fear.

Desperate people in positions of power do bizarre things to hold onto their fiefdoms. Mayor Eddie Perez has shown the all-too human tendency to overexert himself, and this past week demonstrated exactly how troubled the Mayor really is.

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