Should a school apologize for this?

[MaddLlama]

While that sounds good in theory, it is not practice. The United States Supreme Court, in the 1988 Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier decision, upheld the right of public high schools to censor student publications, including newspapers and yearbooks.

In essence, the majority opinion of the Supreme Court said that the rights of public school students are not necessarily the same as those of adults in other settings. The decision said it said that the newspaper (and by extension yearbook), was not a "forum for public expression" by students, and thus the censored students were not entitled to broad First Amendment protection.

But, they didn't actually censor the publication. The thing about the yearbook, at least in that school and all others in that county is that the yearbook is student run, and they're not given many guidelines as to what they can and can't use for quotes. The yearbook gets put together very quickly, so the school doesn't exactly have the time to go through and censor every quote it doesn't like, contact the students and make them think up a new one.
That is exactly why the school is apologizing for the quote being printed. They didn't censor it and they think they have to be sorry. It's already in print, so this really isn't a censorship issue, it's a issue of whether or not the school should be apologising for something so innocuous. Worse things have been spraypainted on the side of train stations, and not cleaned up for months. Though, I suppose Northport and all of Long Island being a very very Jewish area they feel they need to cover thier bases. Or some looney parent complained about it.

 

[ProudWiccan]

True, the school didn't censor the quotes. But, my original point was that, had they chosen to do so, they would have been well within their rights.