Blog 4

            While I didn't put much mileage on my car this week, I managed to cover a lot of ground researching Arizona student publications and the Arizona legislative history of an attempt in 1999 to pass an anti-Hazelwood statute. By the close of the week, I advanced to the next stage in my Senior Research Project-- launching my survey and receiving responses from public high school journalism faculty advisers.

Monday

            Logging seemingly-endless hours of phone calls to individual public schools to retrieve email addresses for faculty advisers for yearbooks or newspapers brought me nearer to my goal of selecting a targeted group of 83 schools to survey out of the 385 public high schools in Arizona. Many schools do not produce a student newspaper or even a yearbook. Surprisingly, it's not always the smaller schools in more remote locations; for example, Saguaro and Coronado High Schools in the Scottsdale Unified School District do not have student newspapers. As expected, Maricopa County had the largest pool of public high schools with journalism programs, with Pima County second. More unexpectedly, Yuma County hosts a significant-for-its-size crop of student newspapers. A few schools even offered broadcast journalism on a school TV channel.

            In retrospect, canvassing the schools reinforced what I had been learning by driving around the state in prior weeks: I was brushing up on my geography of Arizona. Looking at various school websites imparted the flavor of the different regions of Arizona, We really are a diverse state: I couldn't reach schools in Flagstaff last Friday because they were closed due to snow, while I was sitting in 70 degree weather in Phoenix.  On a side note, Arizona suffers from an overpopulation of wildcats and bulldogs--the hands-down favorite mascot of a majority of high schools. However, one school probably boasts the most unique mascot in all of the U.S.: Yuma High School cheers on "the Criminals" in homage to its territorial prison. Moreover, BASIS is dwarfed by many schools: Hamilton High School in Chandler squeezes in over 3500 students, and Mesa School District has at least 4 high schools with over 3000 students, also.

Tuesday

            Tuesday began with a bang-- receiving an email containing the Superior Court judge's decision on my father's Motion for Summary Judgment in the Mesa Public School adv. Encinas, et. al. case. The motion was granted! Thus, Mesa Public Schools will not have to go to trial to defend itself against the plaintiffs' allegation of a breach of the claimed duty to provide a school crossing guard for non-students. I wasn't surprised that my father prevailed, since I had thought at the oral argument that he had the stronger argument, using the Monroe vs. BASIS Schools case as precedent. However, the judge's off-record comment at the conclusion of the hearing expressing that this was a "tragic" case had me a little worried. However, the judge agreed with my father, finding the plaintiffs' reliance on the Alhambra case did not apply because the school district in that case had created a crosswalk and thus had assumed a duty to anyone who used the crosswalk, not just students. However, in the Mesa Public Schools case, the crosswalk was not of Mesa Public School's making, but rather an existing crosswalk which imposed no legal duty on the School District to provide crossing guards for non-students. Even though the guards sometimes arrived before school was dismissed, the court held that those facts did not impose a duty upon Mesa Public Schools.

Wednesday

            Once again, a well-timed phone call saved me a car trip. Using the citation I found at the county law library at the courthouse last week, I followed up with the Arizona State Library at the capital, ferreting out the legislative history of the Senate Bill introduced in 1999 to prohibit censorship in Arizona student publications. Because all bills after 1997 have their history available online, I accessed the minutes of the Committee on Education, which was assigned the S.B.1212-441R in February 1999. Senator Lopez, a Democrat representing District 22, was the "Prime Prime Sponsor" for the bill. I already knew the bill failed to pass, but I did not realize that it was never even voted upon. Instead, the Committee held the bill; no further action was taken on the bill in the Judiciary or Rules Committees. The minutes provided a few answers, but simultaneously provoked more questions. I learned that the Arizona Civil Liberties Union supported the bill under the right to free speech in US and Arizona Constitutions and stressed that such laws exist in other states, in which no disputes over student publications have arisen thereafter. Senator Lopez explained that authorized student publications would include a faculty adviser to decide with students what to publish.

            Next, I created an 11-question survey using SurveyMonkey in order for faculty advisers to feel comfortable, knowing that their responses would be anonymous. My survey will provide data to anecdotally assess the extent to which schools in Arizona practice prior review or label student publications as speech-protected public forums. Questions also addressed self-censorship. I modeled some of the questions after a survey of high school journalists and their media advisers at the National High School Journalism Convention in Washington DC in 2013. In this way, I can compare my Arizona survey results with a national survey.

Thursday

            Drafting a cover letter to introduce my attached survey, I sent out the survey and was pleased when my first response came through less than one minute later. A few teachers expressed interest in my survey and asked to hear the results. As of this writing, I've received 19 responses. Hopefully, this is not a plateau and more responses will arrive over the break.