A little over a year ago A student piece on a new drug got yanked out of the school newspaper being deemed ” too mature”. If they had this new bill here in Michigan they probably wouldn’t have been pulled.

I’m writing to you now because I can, but I am restricted in how I can do so. New Voices is a collaboration of students, teachers, and people who advocate free speech to protect student journalist’s individual rights inside of schools across the country.

I am in full support of this movement because I am a student journalist and I feel I should be able to use my best writing completely uncensored. I can’t think of a reason that somebody would be against this unless they genuinely dislike the idea of giving students more ability to speak freely.

But this is bigger than my mediocre writing. This is about the aspiring journalists in college who can’t achieve their best because they can’t speak freely enough to cover their topics in full or even at all. Some topics I’m talking about are like crimes committed by someone from the school, Traffic accidents involving students from the school, Health inspections done on the school cafeteria, etc.

These topics all have one central thing that is the only other reason why people are against this movement. That is they are all negative towards the school’s reputation, Therefore most schools would rather not have their students talking negatively about their school in that schools paper.

I believe that is completely biased and wrong to do since the people need to know the news, see the stories, and have knowledge about their school. Of course this bill is a common sense list so we aren’t free to say anything we want, but it makes it so that we as student journalists don’t censor our own ideas and thoughts.

I commend the legislators for this bill not only for my own sake, but for all student journalists across Michigan and anywhere where this bill is being introduced.