The Port Townsend School District’s board of directors unanimously approved new policy on freedom of expression for school students, and new guidelines will be adopted in hopes of providing a better environment for adolescents to express themselves.

The board  discussed the policy and what the administrators hope to provide by amending it during the board’s meeting late last week.

“I think that the gist of the revisions is to really claim freedom of expression as a freedom as opposed to a set of restrictions, and to encourage student voice, which is what we’ve been working on,” Board Director Jennifer James-Wilson said during the meeting.

“There still are legal and ethical restrictions to expression, but I think that it is an important feature of what we are trying to do in our school system, is encourage voice and encourage appropriate discussion,” she said.

Notable features of the policy update include removing a prior section expressly prohibiting students from using vulgar or offensive terms in a classroom or school assembly, and the addition of a rule forbidding materials being distributed on school grounds by non-students or non-employees of the district without prior permission from the superintendent or their designee.

According to administrators, Superintendent Linda Rosenbury met with the district’s student advisory council and discussed potential new revisions with students to create an open process for discussion.

While students may not be expressly prohibited from using swear words or similar actions, members of the board reiterated that any speech that demeans any race, creed, or ethnicity — as well as any slanderous speech or other expression that violates the policy — will not be tolerated.

“The Port Townsend School District believes that free expression of student opinion is central to a high-quality civic education in a democratic society … While there are limits to the language and symbols that may be used in the classroom, at assemblies, or school-sponsored activities, student opinion — expressed appropriately — is considered a valuable part of the educational environment,” the policy says.

During the school board’s discussion of the updated rules, new Board Director John Nowak asked about student graduation speeches.

Recalling a peer during his high school years and a planned graduation speech being disallowed because they were critical of the school district, Nowak asked the board how a similar situation would be handled.

“I’m just wondering if you looked at how this would be applied; what would happen in that situation?” Nowak asked.

“I think that all the speeches are vetted by the building leadership before graduation. I would hope that there’s room for productive criticism and reflection. We’re saying that they can’t be crude, lewd, libelous,” James-Wilson said.

Rosenbury added her perspective to the discussion, reiterating that students would ideally meet with school administrators and discuss potential problems before resorting to a critical speech during graduation.

“There are situations where a student’s speech can have a major disruption to the educational environment. And I would hope that a student would be able to exercise their voice at many points throughout their K-12 experience, so they wouldn’t be bottling it up until the speech,” Rosenbury said.

“But if so, I would hope that we could work them through the speech so they could still speak as freely as possible while not being slanderous or disrupting the educational process,” she added.