Guest speaker Nick Ferentinos discusses history of Hazelwood, HIV

Nick Ferentinos, former journalism adviser at Homestead High School in Cupertino, Calif., visited Newsroom by the Bay today to talk about his experience as the adviser to The Epitaph, an award-winning student newspaper that was one of the first in the nation in 1987 to report on a student who was HIV-positive. Two days before the paper went to press, the school’s principal warned students they would be punished if they ran the article, citing a Supreme Court decision that day in the case of Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, which expanded a school’s ability to censor high school publications. “It was pretty impressive,” said Kaden Greenfield, who came to NBTB from Sioux Falls, S.D. “I thought it was so interesting. I loved the fact that he knew about the AIDS case, and it was so interesting how that played out, because that never happens in my hometown. And I thought it was really the quintessential case of journalism ethics.”