*Note from the editors: All opinions expressed in the following piece are those belonging to the writer and not those necessarily shared by the publication or held by GRHS.
On April 14, 2025, I was banned from the library.
More precisely, I was asked to leave the library during the AP US History I “Big Cheese” event, since I’m not a member of the class. I was told about two days later by a teacher that I was banned from the library. As of now, I’m fairly certain I can return safely.
Every year, Ms. Warrington hosts the Big Cheese event surrounding an APUSH lesson about the beginnings of public education in America, where students create and deliver a presentation listing some changes to the school, and justify them through the advocacy of Horace Mann, a historical figure who fought for public education reform. This is a fun exercise in civics for some people, and a potential annoyance to others.
Every year, Ms. Warrington also gathers a panel to review the presentation consisting of teachers and administrators and, starting this year, some students from the previous year’s class.
So, on April 11, I skipped my eighth period class to go to the library, armed with nothing but a vague handwritten list of topics that I wanted to speak on, and I listened to the three presentations that fit into that period. Hazel Foster, a writer and editor for The Chomp, suggested improvements to the Homework Clinic program. Viktoria Syvanych proposed that the school should offer the AP European History class. Oliver Crumrine outlined a few options for improving civics curricula.
Surprisingly, I was allowed, peacefully, to sit through the first episode of Big Cheese.
But on the second day, I returned for the next, hopefully more expeditious, set of presentations, which a number of panelists did not attend. It took only the length of one presentation—the second half of Oliver’s presentation—for me to be instructed to return to class. So I left, but I didn’t return to class: I went to my favorite “sanctuary teacher,” who shall remain nameless, and started discussing my Big Cheese presentation with them. I returned to the library with a larger, updated speech and addressed one willing administrator and one group of my friends, and then the bell rang.
On the last day of presentations, April 16, I was on the eleventh grade history trip doing all the totally academic trip stuff you do in Philly, interspersed with some small amount of learning. When I returned that afternoon, I overheard that “the last student of mine that went to the library got banned.” I asked for clarification, and apparently, that’s me.
Now I’m going to cover what I planned in my draft speech for Big Cheese, albeit heavily edited here.
Free Speech
In 2023, when I returned to The Chomp, I was planning to submit a statement arguing that my censorship in a prior (2021) article was inconsistent with law.
In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled that the Hazelwood School District in Missouri had acted lawfully in censoring an article about teenage pregnancy in its student newspaper, The Spectrum. Building on its 1969 precedent in Tinker—ruling the Des Moines Independent Community School District illegally prevented students from wearing black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War—the court held that only actions of censorship “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns” are permitted.
“Legitimate pedagogical concerns” include, the Court said “speech that is, for example, ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences.” It further included that a school newspaper is not a public forum, unless “by policy or practice” it becomes one, and “a school need not tolerate student speech that is inconsistent with its basic educational mission, even though the government could not censor similar speech outside the school.”
By these criteria, my article would have fallen under “inconsistent with [Gateway’s] basic educational mission.” But that analysis is inadequate. The article merely stated issues with the use of technology within the scope of that mission. To state that certain activity by the government is unjust or wrong is not comparable to maliciously or negligently undermining the credibility of its officers—which would be reasonable to censor. That was not the case in my article.
I thought that things had changed for the better after New Voices legislation passed at the end of 2021 , but then I dared to step on toes.
During my career as a second-rate (school) journalist, I’ve had numerous run-ins with the administration. First was the article about the Latin program that I wrote last year. During the entire process of writing the article, I was encouraged to make it less controversial. My fellow Latin students and The Chomp writers followed with statements to the effect of: What benefits could we highlight? I daresay most students felt the program was indefensible, but I was challenged on the grounds that I needed to be more balanced and provide a more extensive context. When I questioned the administration’s efforts to support students with an online program during an instructor maternity leave, I stated my opinion that those efforts weren’t enough, and that was balanced enough, in my opinion, at least for an opinion piece. Nonetheless, I ended up with the editor-in-chief’s virtue-signaling rebuttal published in my same article, supported by the administration and The Chomp.
I also contributed to the jeans article, which examined P.E. dress code policy at Gateway. Following an interview for this article, I felt accused of journalistic misconduct. Regarding the article, someone said that at Gateway, we give students a lot of freedom. Sure, students can pick different options for P.E. activities, and of course Planet Fitness—evidently the quintessential example of a commercial gym—doesn’t allow its customers to wear jeans, but those were irrelevant to my rationale justifying needed dress code policy change. Sensible curricular standards include the understanding that the point of P.E. class is to improve public health by promoting some minimal level of physical activity, so I asked, why do we care about jeans?
As an aside before I close, I would like to personally thank Dr. Pierro, Gateway’s principal, for his efforts to keep journalism writers independent and feeling safe and supported.
Following this narrative of my journalistic escapades, I will reproduce these two excerpts from the dissenting opinion in Hazelwood, penned by Justice William J. Brennan Jr.:
Tinker teaches us that the state educator’s undeniable, and undeniably vital, mandate to inculcate moral and political values is not a general warrant to act as “thought police” stifling discussion of all but state-approved topics and advocacy of all but the official position.
Such unthinking contempt for individual rights is intolerable from any state official. It is particularly insidious from one to whom the public entrusts the task of inculcating in its youth an appreciation for the cherished democratic liberties that our Constitution guarantees.
Moving on.
Class Rigor and AI
A student in a class of mine shared their paragraph arguing that “school is overrated,” citing that one of their classes has minimal teaching apart from a short lecture or a few videos. They wrote:
Overrated is a diminishing term that rates something as valued too highly. Many people feel that everyday activities, items, or food places are held to such high standards when in reality the term overrated applies to it. 7 hours a day, students are in a classroom learning, but are they actually learning that whole time? School is a place where the term overrated should be applied too. School should be teaching time management and how to handle your work in a timely fashion, but instead students are wasting their time sitting on their phone waiting for something interesting to do. For example, [during an 80 minute class], my teacher gives the absolute bare minimum attention to us students. After I finish my 5 minute long assignment that taught me little to nothing, I pull out my phone along with the rest of the class and scroll. Students are wasting their days in the classroom when they could be out experiencing the joy of life and valuable life lessons. Instead of forcing young kids to sit still through assignments that don’t acquire [sic] any form of interaction, teach them how to manage their time through important and exciting work. School is described by authority figures as a place to learn socializing skills, see what your brain can do in difficult situations, and equip you with fundamental knowledge needed for life, but in reality it’s overrated because it dismisses the preparation needed for future endeavors by leaving kids bored and unengaged.
Notably, they said they learned little to nothing from the assignments, and I will corroborate that story by saying that in several of my classes, the students around me either just don’t do assignments or feed each part of them into ChatGPT. I know the school is all-in on AI, after they received the “AI Innovations in Education” grant to work on it, but it is getting to a point of ridiculousness now how often AI-generated work remains a point of non-contention and how some students are left feeling demotivated in their classes because of unused time. Even I understand that as long as the work gets done by the end of the marking period, I can use the class period however I want; for example, I wrote my speech, and now this article, while ignoring my work in history.
But about AI, it gets to a certain point that it completely baffles even me, and I used to be the student using AI for everything. Even I can object to it on the basis of the corporatocracy backing it. And of course one can say it is preparing students for the real world, or it augments students’ creativity—but the truth is AI is an alternative to critical thinking, and no amount of that should be tolerated.
When students are demotivated, even the most academic students can just delegate their assignments to ChatGPT. So what’s the solution to this? Apparently the leading candidates are let’s ban cell phones and let’s embrace AI. I don’t think I like those options, because the former directly takes away individuals’ agency and autonomy and the latter doesn’t teach all that embracing AI means. I would say these two are antithetical educationally.
There’s certainly a larger cultural problem behind this, but I think that a school has a lot of leverage in implementing effective engagement as a strategy against students feeling demotivated. When there’s 40 minutes left in an honors class and students have finished their work, and no one else seems to be working, it is objectively a waste of time. While I like the block scheduling for many of my classes since it offers focused instruction and work time, classes do exist in which much time is wasted.
If we wanted to reallocate this time productively, we could spend some time in these classes on debate or discussion of what we’re learning, or make connections to a modern context. That’s the reason we learn history: Vice President Kamala Harris famously said, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” And that’s a meme, but it’s also a great illustration of what I’m talking about.
In Conclusion
I don’t get the full benefit of history class by—for the more academically inclined students—silently drawing analogies and not talking about them, because the point of it—and for people in APUSH, here’s my Horace Mann moment—the point is to teach us how to participate in democracy properly, and to inform us on how to make what Cory Booker called good trouble in order to effect change.
That’s exactly what this Big Cheese event was trying to do: repurpose history class time in some semblance of civic process. Since I went to the event uninvited, I had one hour’s notice on the day that it was happening. And I skipped class to go. I was asked to leave simply for standing in opposition to these rules. But Cory Booker told me, and he told all of us, to make some good trouble. I went to Big Cheese with the mission to crash the party, yes, but also to try to make some real change, even if I would just talk for a few minutes and then everyone would move on.
Gateway prides itself on being a forward-thinking, student-centric space, yet through all of this, all they’re really doing is containerizing—isolating—the students who care about academics or who have their own convictions from the rest of the populace. And that’s a concerning trend worldwide that we suppress dissent on the basis that it’s dangerous to the establishment. This happens when articles get censored—even when the majority opinion of Hazelwood or New Voices covers a writer, making Justice Brennan’s words ring clearer than ever today.
Accordingly, I would prefer administration go all-in on a comprehensive civics curriculum rather than offer dubious promises with an AI grant. Additionally, prior consent and review should not be required to participate in a “free speech” civic advocacy event like Big Cheese. I’d therefore like to propose that in the future Big Cheese becomes more inclusive.
