Longtime adviser loses student newspaper job

Naperville Central High School teacher Linda Kane was fired Monday from her longtime post as the school's student newspaper adviser.

Kane will be allowed to finish the school year at the paper's helm -- a position she has held for 19 years -- and to continue teaching English at Central for the remaining two years until her scheduled retirement.

It is unclear whether she will be allowed to continue teaching journalism, but she said Monday she doesn't believe it will be permitted.

Kane has been under fire for the past few weeks for articles that appeared in the Feb. 28 edition of the award-winning Central Times newspaper that some administrators said glorified drug use and contained inappropriate language.

The package of stories included a first-person account by a student who said he used marijuana and later began selling it. There also was a column against drug use and a news story that presented both sides of the issue. Two of those stories contained some profanity.

But what began as a battle over the paper's First Amendment rights soon became an issue of how the veteran adviser handled the school's subsequent investigation into the matter.

Administrators asked Kane to resign her newspaper post last week, but she refused.

Kane said officials called her into a meeting Monday morning in which they admonished her for making negative comments about Principal Jim Caudill to the Daily Herald, acting unprofessionally when Caudill visited one of her journalism classes to discuss the controversial articles, and having a blow-up with then-assistant adviser Harmony Watts.

"It just escalated from me standing up for what I think is right to I've been a bad girl and need to be punished," Kane said.

Superintendent Alan Leis said in a prepared statement that the situation saddens him. He said the issue is not the Central Times articles, the First Amendment or Kane's past accomplishments.

"It simply has to be a major concern when any coach or sponsor substitutes his or her judgment for that of her supervisor's, and more disturbingly in this situation, publicly attacks the competence and the intentions of her principal in a quote to the local newspaper," Leis said in the statement. "School systems have to foster mutual respect, and the adults in that system have a responsibility to model that behavior for students."

Leis went on to note that he appreciates Kane's service to the Central Times and has received positive comments about the adviser from her former students. But he said he agrees with another comment he received saying the paper is the school's, not the adviser's.

While she has had small scuffles with administrators in the past, Kane said she has never been disciplined in her 32 years of teaching. She said she feels sick thinking about it.

The ordeal "cost me something that's a big part of me," Kane said.

If she had it to do over again, she said she probably would not have gone to Watts to try to talk about the situation, which led to an argument.

But she said her quotes in the Daily Herald were the truth.

"That's exactly how I felt, but according to the district I guess I'm not being loyal enough to them," she said. "It's like a parent and a child, where I'm being insubordinate so I'm going to be punished."

She said she does not recall being unprofessional when Caudill visited her classroom.

In fact, Kane said she believes the district has been unprofessional in handling the situation with last-minute meetings and an e-mail Caudill wrote in response to one of her former students who contacted him about the situation.

She is consulting with a labor relations attorney on how to proceed.

District officials still are deciding whether they will mandate a change in the school newspaper's policy regarding profanity. The newspaper staff has threatened to take legal action if they do.