First Amendment rights aren’t something Jaclyn Gutierrez and Lori Schafer will stand to have violated.

The two high school juniors from Colorado are the 2011 recipients of the Champion of the First Amendment Award for ISU First Amendment Day.

Gutierrez and Schafer, students Overland High School in Aurora, Colo., first struggled with violation of the First Amendment in January when their principal Leon Lundie instituted prior review on the school newspaper, The Scout.

The newspaper published an opinion article about racial stereotypes placed on black girls within the high school.

“The guy who wrote it wrote about how some black girls are seen as loud and obnoxious, and why they see themselves this way,” said Gutierrez, opinion editor of The Scout. “He said in the article that he believed it was because the girls haven’t grown into their true personalities yet and they act out to get attention. Mr. Lundie claimed that he had received a complaint saying that this was inappropriate and they were offended. The thing is, the kid who wrote it is African American.”

“It is legally pretty clear under Colorado law that just because somebody might have a problem with something written, it doesn’t make it unprotected speech,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center. “The fact that something might be controversial or offensive to some people is not enough to remove it from the protection of the law.”

Lundie stated from that point he would be instituting prior review on the issues before publication.

Conflict ignited again in March between the newspaper and Lundie when Schafer wrote a memorial story about the death of a student, Leibert Phillips.

The article stated Phillips died when a blood clot traveled to his lungs. The clot was a result of a fractured ankle that Phillips sustained during a home wrestling match.

Lundie read over the article before publication and claimed the cause of death was inaccurate. However, the girls got then information from Phillips’ mother and obtained his death certificate from her stating that the cause of death was, in fact, from the blood clot.

“He still denied it, but later he dropped the cause of death point because he knew we wouldn’t give up on it,” Schafer said. “Then he said that the story was not balanced and that there weren’t two sides to it. I just asked him, ‘How can there be two sides to a death?'”

“He also questioned a sentence I had in there about how the school did not call the kid’s mom,” Schafer said. “I offered to take the sentence out, but he was like, ‘No, no, that’s fine. You don’t need to do that.'”

But Lundie wouldn’t let the point go.

“Lundie told us that the school did call the mother and they had it on a call log,” Schafer said. “But when we asked to see the call log he wouldn’t show it to us, and Leibert’s mom had said she didn’t receive a call. He also said that I needed to talk to the coaches and trainers to get their side of the story, but he wouldn’t give us a way to contact the coach.”

The next day Lundie called in The Scout’s adviser Laura Sudik and informed her she was to be removed from her advising duties.

He went to the class and said the publication would no longer be publishing.

“I came into this situation the day [Sudik] was relieved of advising,” said Carrie Faust, president of the Colorado High School Press Association. “She called me crying saying she was no longer the newspaper’s adviser.”

It all happened so fast, Schafer said.

“Within less than 24 hours we had no adviser, our newspaper was being censored, and we weren’t even allowed to print anymore,” Schafer said. “And to make matters worse, by the time we got to talk to the trainers that day, they told us they weren’t allowed to say anything to us.”

Phillips’ mother had no complaints about the article.

“There wasn’t even a lawsuit that Phillips’ mother had against the school,” Gutierrez said. “She said that she doesn’t believe in suing anybody and that she just doesn’t want this to happen to someone else’s child.”

The Phillips article and opinion piece tackling stereotypes weren’t the only instances Lundie objected to in the publication.

He also took issue to an article revealing how Overland High has the lowest graduation rates as well as the lowest scoring rates in the district; an article Lundie contributed to.

“Lundie came to us and told us we should do that story,” Gutierrez said, referring to the graduation rates story. “He even gave us the statistics, and we quoted him nine times in the article. But when the story came out, he said we had gotten the facts all wrong.”

Lundie also took issue with a piece that Schafer had written about coping with the suicide of her brother five years ago.

“He told me that my story about my brother’s suicide was too graphic and inappropriate for high school students,” Schafer said.

“It was a revision of an English paper she had written,” said Jane Schafer, Lori’s mother. “She was merely describing how she felt. I thought it was very pertinent because there are very few students nowadays who don’t know of someone who has committed suicide.”

Determined to fight their case, the girls invited reporters to a news conference March 24 with the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and Carrie Faust of the Colorado High School Press Association. 

“People in Colorado and especially students are very attune to their legal rights,” LoMonte said. “They know when something is not right and they will do whatever it takes to maintain their First Amendment rights.”

Faust said she is confident the girls are telling the truth.

“I don’t believe that kids will start fights that they don’t need,” Faust said. “In this case, I’ve definitely noticed that Mr. Lundie’s story has changed at least three or four times. The girls’ story has remained the same. That would certainly tell me that they are telling the truth.”

But Lundie changed his mind one more time Monday, and called the girls in for an unexpected meeting.

“I was nervous because I was wondering what was going to happen,” Schafer said. “We’ve kept our stories straight the whole time but I didn’t know what he would say this time.”

“I was actually kinda mad,” Gutierrez said. “He likes catching people off guard and I felt like that’s what he was trying to do to us.”

“It was frustrating because I was walking down the hall to the conference room and I was thinking about all the times he has changed his story. I didn’t know what he was going to say this time so I called my mom and told her about the meeting.”

Diane Gutierrez, Jaclyn’s mother, told her not to go in without calling Adam Goldstein, the lawyer from the Student Press Law Center.

Goldstein listened in on the meeting via speaker phone. During the meeting, Lundie informed Schafer and Gutierrez that he would allow The Scout to publish issues for the rest of the year without prior review.

He also maintained the whole situation was a misunderstanding and that Sudik would be reinstated as adviser of the newspaper for the rest of the year. Next year, they would re-evaluate where things stood and go from there.

But Lundie also said during the meeting that he was hoping to change the publication into an online-only publication, stating that every other school in the district ran their newspaper that way.

Gutierrez and Schafer voiced their disapproval about this.

“We found this was completely untrue,” Gutierrez said. “No other school in the district has an online newspaper. Theirs are all print.”

“Lundie has been looking to make changes to mirror the journalism program at Colorado University,” Faust said. “The thing is, the journalism program at CU has been effectively killed due to the changes they’ve made there. So I don’t know what the future holds for these kids.”

But Gutierrez and Schafer will continue to hold their ground, and that’s something LoMonte commemorates. 

“It is so rare to see high school students deal with the differential of power between school officials and students,” LoMonte said. “It can be very intimidating. But these are government paid officials and they are not infallible. Our duty as citizens is to keep them honest to their legal obligations.”