Utah high school paper fights back against censorship

HERRIMAN, Utah (KSL) – Student journalists at Utah’s Herriman High School are crying censorship after their school newspaper’s website was temporarily disabled when they published two stories alleging inappropriate messaging between a former teacher and a student.

Less than 12 hours after students at the Telegraph student newspaper published their investigation about the teacher’s departure from the school, the two articles disappeared from the publication’s website, which featured a message saying the page was down for maintenance.

When the site resumed functioning, the story about the teacher no longer appeared.

Alex Sousa, the paper’s adviser, said Monday that Herriman High administrators had told him to take the site down in response to the students’ stories about their former teacher.

“The students, in their tenacity, posted the story that they had written, and when the administration found that, they called me early in the morning and told me to delete that story and also to disable the site,” Sousa said.