Last September, Theogony, the student newspaper of Alexandria City High School in Virginia, published a story: “Transportation issues plague school year.”
Alexandria City High School (whose football team inspired the 2000 film “Remember the Titans”) has two campuses 0.6 miles apart, and students are required to take buses to shuttle between them throughout the school day. Julia Gwin, Theogony’s news editor, reported that the buses were routinely late, resulting in students missing class. Hundreds of high schoolers routinely broke the bus-only rule and walked between the campuses, crossing a busy intersection.
The story was the fourth installment of a Theogony investigative series, “Inside the High School Project, and it “probably got the most public attention of any of our articles in recent years, because it was something that was impacting the whole community,” said James Libresco, 17, the co-editor-in-chief of Theogony (along with senior Casey Donohue).
Other news outlets in Alexandria City republished it and built on its reporting. On December 6, Theogony ran an update to its original piece: “Transportation challenges ease.”
The bus story could be seen as an example of how journalism can help solve people’s everyday problems. But the ACPS administration may not have interpreted it that way. Instead, the bus story was a pivot point in a long-simmering disagreement between the students and the school district about the role of a student newspaper.
“I think the transportation story was really the nail in the coffin,” said Caitlyn Meisner, managing editor and a reporter for the local weekly The Alexandria Times, “where [the administration] was like, ‘We need to clamp down.’”
Late last month, the Alexandria City School Board released the draft of a revised student publications policy that expands school leadership’s power to require edits to articles or prevent stories’ publication altogether.
The proposed policy and regulations require certain articles to be submitted up an approval chain, with the school’s executive principal ultimately deciding whether an article can be published. An early version of the policy said students who wrote for outside publications could “lose their journalistic privileges.” According to the policy, the school board is a student publication’s publisher, the school principal is its editor, and the faculty advisor is the co-editor.
“I’ve been doing this work for 34 years…and I don’t remember ever seeing a policy that names the principal, in writing, as the editor of the paper,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel for the Student Press Law Center in Washington, D.C. “If you’re going to have the principal as editor of the paper, it’s simply an extension of the district’s PR office. It’s absolutely not a student newspaper.”
For as long as high school newspapers have existed, school administrations have sought to clamp down on them. But the Student Press Law Center reports a spike in inquiries to its legal hotline over the last year. The situation in Alexandria takes on heightened significance when, right across the Potomac, the Trump administration has knives out for outlets like the AP and the Voice of America. Fears over a more general stifling of the press have helped Theogony students — with the assistance of supportive adults who are applying skills from their day jobs to the school paper’s cause — rally the community around them, even as the school board’s stated goal is to “help students grow as journalists” and “support a high quality journalistic process.”
“The reporting of the student journalists who work [at Theogony] has made a real impact on policies in our city and our schools,” Alexandria City Council member R. Kirk McPike told me. “Some of the student journalists have built on their Theogony work to produce pieces published in professional outlets that serve Alexandria. That should be seen as a validation of the efforts of their teachers and advisors to train them as journalists.”
“Journalism is meant to hold power accountable,” City Council member Abdel-Rahman Elnoubi said in a statement, “and when those in power decide what can be reported, that is textbook authoritarianism…I urge the School Board to reflect on the message this policy sends to students and the broader community, especially at a time when democracy and free speech are under threat nationally.”
Alexandria is a well-off, diverse city of about 160,000. Seven miles away from downtown Washington, D.C., it is closely tied to the federal government, which employs many of its residents. (My casual Googling confirmed that many national political journalists also live there.) J.D. Vance lived in Alexandria before becoming vice president and moving to D.C., but Republicans are in the minority in Alexandria; about 77% of its presidential votes went to Kamala Harris in 2024.
Theogony, the student newspaper, has been around since the 1950s. It publishes some of what you’d expect from a high school paper — varsity sports scores, news on the cell phone ban, rules around student lunch time. In recent months, it has also reported on elementary school students’ exposure to lead and the federal government’s investigation into school policies regarding trans students. It ran a multi-day liveblog about the January 29 plane crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. It has a podcast.
Several months before the bus story was published, in spring 2024, the Alexandria City School Board had told Theogony’s faculty advisor that the board would be updating its policy governing student publications for the first time since 2014, as part of a regular policy review process.
“We thought of it as a great opportunity to create more guidance upholding our First Amendment rights,” Libresco told me. Over the summer of 2024, students from Theogony, the high school’s literary magazine (Labyrinth), and the yearbook (Cerberus) worked together to start creating that guidance. It started out as just a few bullet points, but over the next few months, the students worked with the Student Press Law Center to turn it into a more formal document. The end product, finalized this spring, was “Voices Unbound,” “a just and equitable school board policy for ACPS student publications.”
Voices Unbound, not surprisingly, prioritizes freedom of expression and gives students a great deal of control over publishing decisions. Students discussed it with school board members last fall and came away feeling somewhat reassured that their work would be reflected in the Board’s final proposal.
Still, there were signs that the students and the board might not be on the same page about students’ freedom to publish. Libresco recalled a conversation with one school board member who said, “‘Well, think about The Washington Post. You know, Jeff Bezos can come in and kill a story whenever he wants. That’s just the reality of news media.'”
“I very much disagreed,” Libresco said, “and I was like, ‘It’s more like Donald Trump coming on NPR and saying, from now on, everything [they] do, [he] has to approve.” Other board members in other conversations made the same parallel between Bezos and ACPS’s oversight of Theogony, Libresco said.
The policy created by the school board and the policy created by the students are especially at odds over one key issue: The First Amendment rights of student journalists.
Indeed, student journalists are not necessarily protected by the same First Amendment rights as other U.S. journalists. The 1988 Supreme Court case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier established that schools can choose to censor student publication content for almost any reason — weakening a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Tinker v. Des Moines, that had protected students’ constitutional right to free speech.
States can also choose to give student journalists more protections, though, and 18 states have passed “New Voices” laws doing so. “These laws kind of turn the clock back. If you’re in a New Voices state, you’re essentially covered by a Tinker sort of standard, as opposed to the Hazelwood standard,” the Student Press Law Center’s Hiestand told me. Virginia has passed a law to protect college student journalists, but not those at the high school level.
In Alexandria City, the school board’s proposed policy “basically pushes Hazelwood as far as it can go,” Hiestand said. “They’re basically saying, ‘The Supreme Court has said we can censor speech for basically any reason…and so that’s what we’re going to do.'”
The students’ policy has been endorsed by Alexandria’s mayor and by three of six City Council members, as well as by many Alexandria City High School student organizations. It has not been endorsed by Alexandria superintendent Dr. Melanie Kay-Wyatt, and ACPS did not grant my request for a phone interview with Kay-Wyatt.
“I support a vibrant, student-led press that values accuracy and responsible journalism,” school board chair Dr. Michelle Rief told me in an email Wednesday. “I also believe student journalists should have the right to report on and criticize the School Board and school division.”
I first heard about Theogony in a pitch from an Alexandria City Public Schools parent who is a communications professional and Libresco’s neighbor. She took on Theogony’s cause for free and is one of a number of community adults helping the students out.
After the school board released its proposed guidelines, Theogony’s student journalists kicked off an awareness campaign. On April 29 the paper published an editorial, “ACPS is set to initiate a new policy of censorship. We need your help,” that links to “action steps” community members can take to support Theogony. A Google Doc includes email templates for separate constituencies, including students, parents, teachers, and members of the community. A Change.org petition in support of the students has more than 800 signatures.
The school board meeting with public comment, on Thursday night, comes at the close of Libresco’s high school career (he’s heading to Brown in the fall). “This is my last week of high school, and so much stuff is due,” he said. When I spoke with him, it was 7:30 PM, and he was still at school.
Though this is a “bad situation,” he said, it is “fun work” more than a year in the making.
“From the start,” he said, “we knew the only way we had a chance of getting a fair policy was if our response was flawless.”
