Students regularly wronged on rights So say student rights groups. Recent school tiffs part of larger trend. Saturday, June 17, 2006 • By PRECIOUS PETTY • The Express-Times A student's underwear is visible in a snapshot collage in the 2006 Phillipsburg High School yearbook, so officials Monday cut out the page it appeared on from the $80 annual. Pupils and their parents were shocked by the action. Some equated it with vandalism. National Youth Rights Association Executive Director Alex Koroknay-Palicz said such incidents, though rarely publicized, are commonplace. Forming a students' rights group is one way to prevent them, he said. Such groups may monitor administrators' decisions to assure they're in keeping with school district policy and, when appropriate, offer alternatives, Koroknay-Palicz said. Often, students have no voice and no representation in their schools, Koroknay-Palicz said. "The decisions are made by adults who are not accountable to students whatsoever," he said. "They're allowed to get away with a lot more than they should." Koroknay-Palicz, whose Washington, D.C.-based organization supports giving minors the right to participate in school board elections, said students may also petition for nonvoting membership on school boards. Pennsylvania School Boards Association spokesman Scott Shewell said he is aware of at least one board in the commonwealth with a student member. The yearbook incident was one of several high school controversies in The Express-Times coverage area this week. Two others stemmed from suspected student alcohol-use at separate events hosted by North Hunterdon and Pen Argyl high schools. In each case, community members questioned district policy and the legality of administrators' actions. Mark Goodman, executive director for the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va., said Phillipsburg officials' actions were legal because yearbooks are school-sponsored publications. He said the actions were impractical, however. "It's pretty rare for a page to be physically removed from a yearbook, especially in a case like this when it's an inadvertent and relatively mild kind of problem," said Goodman, who compared the troublesome photo to a misspelling. "It's an unfortunate circumstance, but you can't always avoid it. Everybody, sooner or later, makes a mistake." Phillipsburg School District officials agreed to reprint the page with a replacement photograph and distribute it to students. American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania staff attorney Mary Catherine Roper said officials' response to the incident at North Hunterdon, however, may be questionable. Thirteen high school seniors were taken to a nearby hospital for a blood-alcohol screenings after a prom chaperone found an empty water bottle that smelled of alcohol under their assigned table. Screening results showed only some of the students had been drinking, but all of them missed the June 9 dance because the tests took so long. "If they required the blood testing on the basis of nothing other than a bottle being found under a table at which students happened to be sitting than that almost certainly exceeded the school officials' authority," Roper said. New Jersey School Boards Association spokesman Mike Yaple said state law requires school officials to report suspected substance abuse to a student's parents and schedule an immediate medical examination to determine if a child is under the influence of alcohol or drugs. North Hunterdon officials were just doing as the law requires, he said. "I think that in this day and age school officials are erring on the side of caution," Yaple said. Reporter Precious Petty can be reached at 610-258-7171 or by e-mail at ppetty@express-times.com. © 2006 The Express-Times. Used with permission.