Student editors earn the watchdog award

At Orange Coast College, sometimes the administrators can learn

lessons. And, yeah, sometimes the students are their teachers.

Case in point: OCC’s school newspaper, the Coast Report,

questioned the privacy of the student government’s budget committee

meetings, pointing out that the Brown Act should apply to them.

The state’s Brown Act, adopted in 1953, basically requires that

boards and other public agencies take actions in view of the public.

After all, it is the public’s interest. Exceptions include personnel

matters.

The student budget committee at the college held three closed-door

meetings in April and May to decide how to give more than $700,000 to

various organizations on campus. The money was obviously the public’s

business.

The Coast Report, led by Editor-in-Chief Mike Billings and Copy

Editor Matt Ballinger, discovered that these meetings existed, wrote

an article about the private meetings and then demanded in an

editorial that the illegal meetings become public.

School administrators suspected that the Coast Report had an

ulterior motive in mind when it questioned the meetings. The

newspaper stood to take a cut, OCC President Gene Farrell said.

But really, the administrators should have performed their

research before convicting the inquisitive students. It turns out

that, indeed, the Brown Act applies to the student government and its

budget committee.

Farrell also gave another reason for the closed meetings. He said

the college wanted to protect the students on the committee “because

we don’t want our students exposed publicly by anyone in those

deliberations.”

Elected student governments everywhere really need to learn that

once they become elected, they fall under the public’s eye. They will

be watched, they will be applauded and they will be criticized.

That’s politics. You win some and you lose some.

Students, too, need to learn this. And the earlier the better so

that they decide then and there if they want to enter the outside

world of politics.

The editors at the Coast Report stuck to their instincts and did

what they knew to be right.

It’s a shame the administrators didn’t applaud them for

considering the Brown Act’s reach and instead found a way to turn the

focus onto them.

The Coast Report passes Journalism Law 101. Perhaps others need to

enroll in the course.