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A big victory for students’ rights: a federal judge has blocked a Pennsylvania prosecutor’s plans to file child pornography charges against three teenage girls who stored suggestive photos of themselves on their cell phones.
Two of the three were wearing opaque bras in the photographs at issue, and the third was topless. None was engaging in sexual activity. The three were among twenty students in Pennsylvania’s Tunkhannock School District who were contacted by the prosecutor after school officials confiscated their cell phones, searched them, and found nude or revealing photos on them.
The prosecutor told the twenty students that they had a choice — they could sign up for an ongoing educational program on “what it means to be a girl in today’s society” and mandatory drug tests, or they could be charged with possession and distribution of child pornography, a felony.
Seventeen of the students signed up for the program. The other three sued. And yesterday a federal judge took their side.
The prosecutor, reached for comment yesterday, refused to say whether he would appeal the judge’s decision.
According to the Times of India, students at the Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University in Lucknow staged a march on campus yesterday to complain about one of their professors.
The marchers carried signs and chanted slogans accusing Kamal Jaiswal, head of the department of applied animal science, of sexual harassment, soliciting bribes, and “asking students to visit his place and work as his domestic help.”
According to the article, their complaints led the university’s vice chancellor to suspend the professor and launch an internal inquiry into their charges.
Seventeen-year-olds will have open access to “Plan B” emergency contraception thanks to a judge’s ruling yesterday, and access for younger teens is likely to follow.
A federal court ruled yesterday that the Bush-era Food and Drug Administration relied on politics, not science, when it limited non-prescription sales of Plan B to women aged 18 and over. The court blasted the FDA’s “political considerations … and implausible justifications” in its consideration of Plan B.
The court directed the FDA to allow 17-year-olds access to non-prescription Plan B within 30 days, and to review its decision to require prescriptions for younger teens.
Chris Quintanilla, a 14-year-old eighth-grader in Peoria, Arizona, says he was told by his principal to remove a rainbow wristband that carried the slogan “Rainbows Are Gay.”
The student’s mother says that when she talked to the principal about his action, he told her that some teachers found the phrase offensive.
This is not the first time Natali Quintanilla and the principal have clashed over the school’s treatment of her son. She says that when she told him that Chris was being harassed at school for being gay earlier this year, she was told that he wouldn’t be picked on “if he didn’t put it out there the way he does.”
Unable to secure protection of her son’s free-speech rights directly through the school, Natali Quintanilla took the issue to the ACLU.
The ACLU sent the school district a three-page letter reminding them of students’ free speech rights in school, and asked them to “confirm … within 10 days” that “the District will now allow Chris and other students to wear or otherwise display messages or symbols expressing their support of LGBT rights.”
The district has not yet responded.
April 20 update: Quintanilla has been cleared to start wearing the wristband again.
The omnibus budget bill that the Senate passed last night may make low-cost birth control available from campus health centers after a four-year absence.
The bill incorporated the Affordable Birth Control Act, which overturns provisions of a 2005 law that, in the words of Choice USA,
stopped pharmaceutical companies from providing prescriptions at lower than market costs to health clinics and College and University health centers. Previously, companies were supplying schools and safety-net providers with low cost or no cost birth control. As a result of the [Deficit Reduction Act], low income women and college students were forced to pay market price, approximately $40-$50 per month.
The Affordable Birth Control Act was the subject of intense organizing by campus groups, making its passage a victory for students and for student activism.
Quoting Choice USA again, “This is an example of the power we as young people have to make real change that directly impacts our lives. Congratulations everyone!”
studentactivism.net 
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