Becoming a high school principal must really have a profound effect on a person’s integrity and sense of fairness. Earlier this month, the example was aptly-named principal Donnie Nutt of Dacula High School. Aided and supported by superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks and a 4-1 vote of the Gwinnett County School Board, he fired 23-year-veteran physics teacher Larry Neace. The reason? Neace refused to raise the zero grade he gave to a student (not coincidentally, an athlete) for sleeping in class. The furor over this decision continues.

Update, February 2009: It’s come to my attention that shortly after his dismissal, Larry Neace was hired by a more education-centered school system, and continues to work as a science teacher at Apalachee High School in Winder, GA. Well done, Mr. Neace and Barrow County.

This week, Randolph Bynum, principal of Pebblebrook High School in Mableton, Georgia, has killed the year’s final issue of BrookSpeak, the school’s student newspaper, apparently because it didn’t paint a rosy picture of the school he manages. He’s also announced that he’ll be deleting the school’s journalism class and literary magazine for next year.

This action alone is disturbing enough. When one looks more deeply into the details, and the events surrounding the decision, the plot thickens considerably. I found my feelings changing from disappointment to outrage as I read more and more of the material that’s now publicly available.

An article in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution brought the situation to my attention. You can read the article, reproduced in its entirety, on a new blog operated by the staff of BrookSpeak. A wealth of information about the issue is available there, along with some links to various people and organizations involved in the dispute.

Most interesting among this information is a PDF file of a sequence of e-mails exchanged between teacher/advisor Jonathan Stroud, principal Randy Bynum, and assistant principal Ashley Hosey, among others.

I’m quite astounded that the students were able to obtain this information. If I were Bynum or Hosey, I would certainly not want this to be public knowledge. Reading through the exchange is like opening a window, allowing us to look in on the positions the various players have taken.

From Stroud you’ll witness a refreshing concern for the need to impress proper journalistic integrity and values upon the students in his charge. He makes his points eloquently and in a non-confrontational way, and I was immediately struck by his ability to clearly state his case while staying on the high road and avoiding petty bickering.

From Bynum, you’ll note an amazing disregard for these values. You’ll also see a clear tendency to micromanage. His defensive attitude becomes very clear when he responds to a list of questions from student reporters; he chooses to critique the questions rather than answer them, when such critiques are really Stroud’s job. His fit of pique when things didn’t go his way would be amusing if the consequences weren’t so dire.

From Hosey you’ll read unashamed complaints that the newspaper’s not more biased toward positive issues. When Stroud responds in a clear, non-contentious, informative manner, the result is a surprising outburst (complete with several phrases in all caps) expressing his opinion that faculty should edit the newspaper, not students. Bynum then piles on with a veiled threat to fire Stroud.

Reading through this exchange should dispel any notions that the decision to delete the school’s journalism classes was motivated by anything other than Bynum’s (and Hosey’s) dissatisfaction with the inconvenient honesty of responsible journalism. Even his responses to the press are filled with the very Attitude (capitalization his, not mine) that he complains of in others. To an AJC reporter, he states,

“I am not trying to stop the newspaper. I can’t comprehend how [making it an extracurricular] is going to silence a newspaper.”

It certainly won’t encourage it. He also seems to conveniently forget that ordering publication of the newspaper’s last edition stopped does silence it, at least by all conventional definitions of “silence”. If I were a betting man, I’d give better than even odds that he’s currently trying to silence the blog, too.

Happily, the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Virginia will be happy to pursue the case, according to its executive director, Mark Goodman. The student staff of the newspaper have also contacted higher officials in the Cobb County School District, and one would hope that this capricious decision will be reversed once the facts are fully revealed to them.

My message to Mr. Bynum, were he to ask for my opinion, would be that no man who is devoting himself to his job and his responsibilities need fear the truth being published in a student newspaper. If he doesn’t like hearing about the unpleasant issues such as teen pregnancy and vandalism, perhaps he should devote more time and effort to solving those problems, rather than merely keeping them quiet. The purpose of journalism is to report the truth, not to entertain and uplift the reader.

I urge every reader of my blog to read this information, visit the blog, and weigh in on this issue. I for one will be following the blog and the case closely, and will do anything I can to assist these students, and Mr. Stroud, in their effort to preserve journalism — as both a class and an ideal — at Pebblebrook. Why do I care, when I neither reside in Cobb County nor have a child in public school? Because both of those might change in the future, and this decision, if left to stand, would set a disturbing and dangerous precedent with far-reaching implications.

UPDATE – March 2, 2012: I noticed that the link to the e-mail trail was broken, perhaps because someone succeeded in having it taken down. Luckily I’d archived it, and I’ve now put up a link to my own copy of the PDF.