By Mike Hiestand
Very often, particularly in some of the more successful student media programs, student journalists and their advisers tend to meld into a unified team. Working together on tough stories, dealing with uncooperative sources and, at times, unhappy administrators and readers, putting in the long hours necessary to produce a solid publication on deadline, the sharp teacher/student lines are often blurred. Members of the journalism staff are not just students and a journalism adviser is not just a teacher. It can be an enormously successful and rewarding relationship that keeps journalism advisers coming back year after year to do a job that is arguably the toughest in school and that leaves journalism students with memories and life lessons that most will call upon for decades after.
But in some cases, that blurring of the lines can spell trouble. Fortunately, it is trouble that can be fairly easily sidestepped once identified.
The first danger zone involves confidential sources.
Every year, for example, we receive maybe a dozen calls from student newspapers that have decided to do a story on drugs in school. As part of the story, a reporter has located a student that admits to using (or perhaps selling) drugs in school and is willing to talk, but only if their identity is kept secret. Assuming that the source is legitimate and the information they supply accurate, it often makes for some revealing and powerful copy.
While the use of confidential sources in such cases can be tricky, particularly in the rare situation where law enforcement officials press the reporter to disclose the identity of a source, the law often protects reporters and their secrets. (An excellent online resource to help answer questions about the legal protections available in your state can be found on the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press website at http://www.rcfp.org/csi/.
Serious complications can arise, however, when the student reporter or editor shares the identity of the source with her adviser. Rather than being able to look to the law for help in maintaining the confidentiality of the source, the adviser – a school employee – may be legally bound to report what she knows about unlawful activity that occurs on school grounds, including, presumably, the identity of a known drug user/dealer. In such cases, the adviser and staff are left in a nasty fix. They can either reveal the source’s identity, which would violate both a serious ethical and legal obligation to the source, or they can keep the secret and subject the adviser to possible legal sanctions or punishment (including, presumably, the termination of employment).
Clearly, the best tactic in such cases is for the student staff to keep the identity of the source – and any confidential information obtained from the source – to themselves. An adviser’s ignorance is, given the alternatives, bliss. To avoid such a mess, it is imperative that students be alerted to the potential conflict early on.
At other times, however, an adviser knows information that his students do not; information that the adviser may be obligated to keep secret. This leads to the second common danger zone.
For example, if an adviser is told at a faculty meeting that three of the five starters on the school’s all-state basketball team have just been expelled after it was determined that they participated in an elaborate exam cheating scheme – information that nobody else knows – the journalist’s streak in the adviser may want nothing more than to tear out of the room to share the news with his student staff. After all, it is news and it will break somewhere. Doing so, however, could land the teacher – and the school – in legal hot water.
Advisers are, like all members of the faculty, school employees. As such, they are – with limited exceptions – prohibited by a federal law known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), sometimes also called the Buckley Amendment, from disclosing student educational information to third parties without the student’s (or in the case of most high school-aged students, parental) consent.
While student reporters – who are not school employees – are not bound by the law and can dig and probe all they want for newsworthy information about their fellow classmates, that same freedom does not extend to an adviser.
In addition to being mindful of their obligation not to act as a news source for student information, advisers also need to be careful not to tap other official information sources that may be available to them (for example, a school district’s computer database, a counselor’s files, student medical records, etc.) even when doing so might seem harmless. One adviser, for example, told me that she would use her faculty computer account to occasionally look up the class schedules of students so that her reporters could track them down when they needed to do an interview. While such a practice may not violate the law, I told her it was close enough that it was probably not worth the risk.
As a general policy, an adviser should not use her position to provide her students with school-related information that the students couldn’t obtain independently or through normal channels.
Even the best teams must play by the rules.