Collegiate Times

When a senior and a freshman student were caught performing inappropriate acts at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Va., during lunch one May afternoon, the shit hit the fan.

Of course the school newspaper, the Oracle, was compelled to share its views on the inappropriate act. In doing so, it condemned the actions and asked the student body to respect it and its peers. There was no praise or commendation to follow this editorial. Instead we, the journalists, found ourselves in the classroom without our adviser Brooke Nelson (who was facing an inquiry) and a possible end to the paper.

Twenty minutes into class, we finally heard her heavy footsteps echo down the hallway. Normally, when I arrive in class I anticipate some sort of perturbed look on her face - it's what's expected of a journalism adviser - but that day even I, who had known her so long, was shocked.

"Well," she said to the silent room, "this week is probably my last." Her words enraged the group like a match to fireworks. The unusually quiet class erupted in shouts and demands to know what had occurred in that fateful meeting. After calming the class, she confided in me the seriousness of the circumstances we faced.

After having the complaints relayed by Principal Wardinski, we thought it would be a miracle if the Oracle survived the year. It seemed as though the faculty and staff members had been swarming the principal's office to report their outrage at the newspaper's indignity. While no formal complaint had come to Ms. Nelson or any of the staff members, the principal had made it clear our services were no longer appreciated. In actuality, this myriad of complaints was not from an overwhelming majority, or even a large minority, but rather, from two percent of the school population.

With Ms. Nelson's past experiences as a writer for the Washington Post, an editor of a major magazine and as a press secretary on Capitol Hill, there was no doubt in our minds that our decision in publishing was valid. Our ever-present teacher, however, had suddenly disappeared, becoming engulfed by the waves of meetings regarding this one 300-word editorial. Ms. Nelson was not the only one bombarded by the demands of Principal Wardinski. Our staff room was constantly occupied by him or his minions under his instruction. Stories could not be written, no pages laid-out without leering eyes peering over our shoulders at the bright computer screen.

With these interruptions, it became near impossible to finish a paper on time and even more difficult to dedicate to the quality it deserved. Typos plagued stories, pictures were grainy, headlines cliched and captions uninformative. How were we to fix these blatant errors when we were continuously interrupted and I was no longer able to spend my usual four hours perfecting the pages? I, along with the other journalists, was prohibited from staying past the end of school. The executive power no longer had faith in our moral character.

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