Student journalists like Joseph Mai would face fewer hurdles while publishing their work under two House resolutions that remain alive in the state Legislature.
The House Education Committee passed HR 105 and House Concurrent Resolution 109 on Thursday.
Neither carries the weight of law, but HR 105 was written to eliminate the implied requirement that student publications across Hawaii, including newspapers and yearbooks, must get parental consent before publishing stories and photos of classmates.
HR 105 and HCR 109 also would grant student journalists the same First Amendment rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.
HR 105 and HCR 109 represent a departure from how Hawaii student journalists need additional steps before publication that are not required of professional media.
Mai, a 2024 graduate of McKinley High School and former journalist for the school newspaper, The Pinion, remembers the time-consuming process of verifying parental permission before publishing a story or picture.
“We needed to get each, and every approval for each article from the people we interviewed, which was very tedious but I thought it was necessary to be accountable for what we wrote,” Mai wrote in a text to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
The state Department of Education provides Hawaii high schools with a “Student Publication/Audio/Video Release Form-General” that asks for the signature of a parent or guardian to allow their student to be featured in various school media, so students are protected under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
At McKinley High School any forms that are returned by parents are kept on file by the school registrar.
The Washington, D.C.-based Student Press Law Center — an independent organization that works to promote, support and defend the First Amendment and student press freedoms — disagrees with the notion that minors need parental consent for student-led publications.
“Specifically, FERPA has no application to students’ journalistic publishing, and if a school claims that students will be violating FERPA by publishing news they’ve gathered in a student journalistic publication, the school is wrong,” SPLC wrote on its website.
Even the DOE agrees with the intent of HR 105 to clarify the need for parental consent.
“We basically agree,” Teri Ushijima — the DOE’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instructional design — said at Thursday’s hearing.
“We’ve had a lot of quality training from the Student Press Center, so we’ve been learning a lot,” Ushijima said.
Cindy Reves, an English teacher at McKinley, continues to spearhead the effort to pass HR 105 and has worked for years to loosen restrictions for student journalists.
“This year I’m really ready to push the issue,” Reves told the Star Advertiser.
Reves started as adviser for The Pinion in 2010 and quickly found that media release forms required by the administration posed a roadblock.
This year, Reves said, “At our school we have about 400 students who haven’t returned the form.”
“That’s a lot of students that I can’t let my student journalists talk to.”
The situation has gotten worse.
“As the staff on The Pinion grows, that’s more articles, more people that my students talk to, more opportunities that they might talk to someone who didn’t return the form and more opportunities that I might miss it before it gets published,” Reves said.
Without the flexibility that HR 105 would provide, The Pinion would have difficulty publishing photos that celebrate campus life.
“We wouldn’t be able to cover a major activity in the high school. … This year some kids in the homecoming court hadn’t returned the form,” Reves said.
Reves teaches the importance of media ethics, always ensuring student journalists follow procedures, a process Mai remembers from his time as “Manager of Fun” on the staff.
“Ms. Reves required us to document and turn in each step of the process of reporting, from deciding a story to write, interviewing, fact checking, to writing multiple drafts,” he wrote in his text.
The DOE form provides no deadline for when parents must return the consent forms, making it difficult for Reves to know on deadline which students are cleared for publication or not.
“I have to ask the registrar, who has to make me a PDF, which is static and only shows the results of that moment,” she said.
In written testimony Reves submitted for Thursday’s hearing, she made it clear that student journalists should be valued as a voice for the school and given the flexibility to tell student stories.
“Student journalists and those they interview should be making the decisions about whose voices are heard in student-led publications, and those decisions should be grounded in news value and journalism law and ethics, not FERPA,” Reves wrote.
In separate testimony via Zoom, Reves told the House Education Committee, “The student publication release form is a stone around the neck of student journalists and advisers.”
