06/17/2026
Student journalists at every single MCPS high school are standing up for their right to report freely, and they deserve our backing.
In March, MCPS Chief of Schools Dr. Peter Moran sent principals a memo requiring administrators to review and approve every article before a student newspaper can print it. On June 12, 162 student journalists and newspaper advisers from all 25 high schools sent an open letter asking the district to walk it back, pointing to Maryland's New Voices Act, the law written specifically to keep school officials out of student newsrooms except in narrow, well-defined cases.
WTOP has the full story, including MCPS's response: https://wtop.com/montgomery-county/2026/06/student-journalists-in-montgomery-county-push-back-on-district-memo-citing-censorship-concerns/
As a candidate for the Board of Education in District 3, I keep coming back to one question: who is this policy actually protecting? Not the students learning to ask hard questions. Not the families who rely on student reporters to find out what's happening inside our schools. A free, board-approved student press is one of the few checks we have on how our schools are run, and it shouldn't be optional.
If you agree, the students have a petition asking MCPS to withdraw the memo. Read it, sign it, share it: https://www.change.org/p/stop-mcps-from-censoring-student-journalists-fd94e230-b95c-440d-917b-76596895e941
Stop MCPS from Censoring Student Journalists
