Many of the High School's Graduates
Go On to SF's Academy of Art University

Bill Hill of the Daytona Beach News-Journal files a report on censorship at a Albequerque high school. Back in 2003, it seems, a high school student read a poem critical of the then-imminent invasion of Iraq on the school's closed-circuit TV channel as part of her involvement in a school poetry club:

A school military liaison and the high school principal accused the girl of being "un-American" because she criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's failure to give substance to its "No Child Left Behind" education policy. The girl's mother, also a teacher, was ordered by the principal to destroy the child's poetry. The mother refused and may lose her job.

The club's faculty adviser was first suspended, then fired, and the poetry reading program terminated--after which principal Gary Tripp and the military liaison (and what the heck is a public school doing paying staff members to liaison with the military?) "read a poem of their own as they raised the flag outside the school. When the principal had the flag at full staff, he applauded the action he'd taken in concert with the military liaison." And the fun was just starting, as the column discusses--resulting in the local teachers union, the National Writers Union, and the ACLU filing suits against the school. Learn more about the legal actions and read some local coverage, where you'll learn Nevins wasn't the only teacher in the city to run afoul of school administrators for refusing to suppress students' anti-war-themed art.