I produced and edited an underground newsletter, known as The Vulture, at my old high school in Miami. It did not exist to hammer the school, it was simply a student-run combination newsletter and literary magazine. It was published three times a year for two years, by and for students alone. No faculty/staff involvement or permission.
We hand-wrote or typed articles into a computer, then I used QuarkXPress for laying out the text and graphics. Then I printed the whole issue onto one 8.5" by 11" sheet of paper, both sides, in a very tiny font. Then I photocopied that onto two-sided paper at Office Depot (maybe 200 copies per issue). Then we went to school, usually late afternoon or early evening on a weekend (this was before the institution of the locked gate and guard, can you say "Heil"?), and we slipped one copy into every other locker throughout the school. That includes the middle school. The trend at the time, and probably to this day, was to separate the middle and upper schools as much as possible -- physically, academically, and socially -- which is absolutely the worst thing you can do in a school, IMHO. Asinine. Anyway, we felt that the younger students were capable of not only reading, but understanding and maybe even enjoying what we'd done, and we certainly were not about to follow the administration's lead and patronize them by excluding them. The day after distribution, we'd scour the halls during lunch and pick up all the unwanted copies off the floor (we did this so that the administration wouldn't have an easy excuse to get all up in arms about the LITTER) and that was that.
This activity -- this free, creative, and educational activity -- is now expressly prohibited by the Student Handbook. The prospect of leaving something totally in the hands of -- my God, CHILDREN -- was just too much for the Administration, even though we never actually printed anything detrimental to the school. Never. In fact, most of the teachers secretly praised our work. But the mere realization that we could have generated a humongous public relations vs. free speech nightmare was enough to scare the administration into a fascist little corner. Be a good little clone, like everybody else.
Well, at least we changed something.
A little disclaimer: Much (but not all) of what is written here
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