By Jean-François Bertrand
Censorship is alive and well in high school yearbooks.
While high school students can express themselves in their yearbook, there is a point where teachers and principals will intervene and sometimes censor.
Chris Dorey, a teacher at St. Paul Catholic high school, is one of these unabashed censors. “Censorship has to exist,” he says sternly, adding that it is needed to support the school’s morals and ideals.
At the other end of the spectrum is Roger Taguchi, who has been responsible for the yearbook at Hillcrest high school for the last 14 years. “I have difficulty (with) editing content,” he says, adding he will only censor in special cases.
At St. Paul’s, the strict yearbook editorial policy has less to do with the fact that it’s a Catholic school than with an incident, three years ago. A disgruntled student editor had slipped a sentence into the yearbook, which made its way back onto the proofs, even after he had been told to remove the offensive line.
It read, in a mirror image: “Working on a Yearbook is like doing a porcupine… It’s fifteen hundred pricks against one!” (See bottom of page.)
When the yearbooks arrived, the new principal read it cover to cover and found the offending phrase.
The reaction was quick: members of the yearbook production committee were told to blackout the line with markers. On 750 copies.
“We were so mad!” recalls Elaine Turcotte, then part of the yearbook team and subsequently its co-editor for two years. “We spent a whole week doing that!” (For her efforts, she got to keep an uncensored copy of the yearbook.)
She says she was angry with the author of the line, not at the principal for his decision to censor.
“We have ideals that we have to support,” says Doey. “There are things we can’t publish. It has to be that way: the ideal of freedom of expression doesn’t exist.”
It seems to exist at Hillcrest high though, where Taguchi shows a lot more latitude in the content of the yearbook, especially in the “grad write-up” section, where graduating students submit a paragraph that will appear next to their picture.
While direct references to sex and drugs are forbidden, Taguchi allows the use of asterisks to replace vowels in certain offensive words. In Hillcrest’s yearbook, one can find “B*TCH.”
“There are some references to dope and sex that are hidden. That, we have difficulty editing,” says Taguchi.
Because some messages can be coded — and educators are not always familiar with the street names of new drugs — the school’s administration tried last year to cancel the 18-to-20-page grad write-up section. “The graduating students were very angry, and the principal backed down,” says Taguchi.
Graduating students at St. Paul Catholic high also have their section in the yearbook. They are allowed 650 characters to express themselves, but the censorship rules are strict.
Since the St. Paul’s offensive line incident, says editor Turcotte, control has been tight on the grad write-ups. “We had to sit down with the principal, everything was watched and edited. I had to submit the whole grad section (for approval),” she says. She recalls having to read through 174 grad write-ups one year, flagging references to alcohol (“That’s kind of extreme.”), sexual double entendres, and hidden messages.
She reluctantly accepted the new rules. “We had no choice. We could not complain about it. It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
At J. S. Woodsworth high school, teacher Scott Hughes says he teaches the art of consensus to the six students producing the yearbook. “If we come across objectionable content, we’ll talk about it and figure out if it’s a go.”
He says students understand that parents will look at their yearbook, and that reality usually weans out the more questionable content.
“It’s with the graduate write-up that we see the most questionable material. Obscene words, vulgar language (and) references to drinking are eliminated,” says Hughes.
For example, the line “I enjoyed dancing with Mary-Jane” would have to be edited, because of its reference to cannabis.
But Hughes says he always talks with the author before making a change in a grad write-up. But it can be a difficult challenge.
“Last year, a lot of things got through, (like) acronyms, which had meaning only for a few students.” Overall, the content of Woodsworth’s yearbook depends on whether these are caught or not.
“We use common sense. We will not censor (the students) if it is not out of hand.”
But there is still one section of the yearbooks beyond the reach of even the most meticulous censor.
The last bastion of freedom of expression in yearbooks lies in blank pages where friends sign each other’s books.“We call those the signature pages. If you have something personal (to say), do so in these pages,” says St. Paul’s Dorey.