Franklin County students participating in a media course are getting an unplanned lesson in the First Amendment.

Brandon Creasy, a 16-year-old junior who attends the Leonard A. Gereau Center for Applied Technology and Career Exploration, claims that an opinion piece he wrote backing the theory of evolution is being censored by the school's principal.

Creasy submitted the piece for a school news magazine, but Principal Kevin Bezy said this week he decided it wasn't proper to publish, at least until it was revised. Creasy says he believes Bezy had problems with the piece because the principal doesn't believe in evolution.

When asked his opinion of evolution and how that may have factored into the situation, Bezy declined to discuss his feelings on the theory. He said he considers that irrelevant to the matter, believing it important to remain unbiased when making decisions.

"The law gives the principal the responsibility to edit publications of the school," Bezy said. "It is an important responsibility because the principal has to look out for the rights and sensitivities of all students, especially in a diverse and multicultural area."

Continuing, he said of the piece: "It didn't present the theory with a sensitivity for those who hold other theories. The teacher of the student was asked to take out language that stated his theory is the only theory."

David Campbell, who teaches the Introduction to Media class in which Creasy wrote the article, said Bezy told him "the article sounded angry with the church, it wasn't based on fact and he [Bezy] intimated that the potential for community backlash might be an issue."

Campbell said that Creasy's contribution was an opinion piece -- not a news article, which would call for a more unbiased look at the topic.

Creasy and another student in Campbell's class, Shawna Hicks, said there's some belief that the school's In The Groove news magazine -- published as part of the class -- will be canceled because of the issue over Creasy's piece.

Bezy, however, said the magazine will still be published and that he would be agreeable to approving a revised version of Creasy's piece to run in a later issue.

Creasy said Wednesday that he has no plans to revise what he wrote. Instead, he said he will resubmit it as is.

"I thought it was a pretty well-written piece," he said. "It's a thing that I think about and I believe in it."

One sentence in Creasy's piece states, "Evolution is a fact folks, not a theory!"

An exact date of the next publication of the magazine was not specified.

Campbell said more discussions will have to take place to determine when the magazine will be published. He said he was originally told it was canceled, then later told it wasn't.

Each quarter, students of the class are expected to submit articles for the publication, Campbell said. Creasy's other submissions included articles on skateboarders and one on genocide, he said.

After students questioned Bezy's right to cut Creasy's writing, Campbell said he turned the situation into a teaching tool.

"We are using the situation to discuss First Amendment rights as they pertain to student publications, not as a way to go against the school or the system, but so that they understand that a principal has the authority to pull any magazine article from a school publication."

The Introduction to Media class is a prerequisite for journalism, photojournalism and telecommunications classes at the school. Students research, write and edit articles, take pictures to accompany those articles and critique newspapers.

The Gereau Center is a county secondary school that works in tandem with Franklin County High School to teach students viable skills from today's workplace.

Brandon Creasy's essay

By Brandon Creasy

Evolution is a genetically based change from generation to generation. If and only if you look exactly the same as both your parents and they look exactly the same as your grandparents and so on back to the beginning of life can you say that evolution has not occurred.

Since I assume you are an organism born on this planet, and that you are a human being, rather than some clone, I assume you do not look exactly like both your parents and that they do not look exactly like their parents, and that the differences are, at least in part, genetically based. Therefore, within your own family, evolution has occurred. You have seen evolution. Evolution is a fact folks, not a theory!

How long evolution has occurred, under what circumstances, and what drives it are theories. Evolution is not the theory. How life has been shaped by evolution is the theory. When a scientist says "the theory of evolution", it's not the "theory that evolution occurred," it's the "theory of how evolution occurred" that's being spoken of.

Even so, a scientific theory is a bit different than "I think the moon is made of cheese." A scientific theory must be 1) falsifiable and 2) not disproved after some investigation.

Falsifiability means that you can disprove it without resorting to supernatural phenomenon. Show me a way to disprove that some god (any god) created the world, that could be done through natural investigation, and I'll say it meets one of the criteria. I haven't seen such a way even offered yet.

So far, the theory of evolution by means of natural selection (which was Charles Darwin's theory) has been shown to be the best explanation for the path evolution has taken life. And much of what Darwin and Wallace wrote about in their early work has been found to be incorrect, but the basic premise that evolution occurs through natural selection has not been disproved.

The theory of natural selection says that organisms which do better in a particular environment will pass that ability to do better on to their offspring, and that those offspring will be more numerous than the offspring of organisms that fared poorly (at its most basic, really all it says is that {under natural conditions} the healthy leave more descendants than the unhealthy). So far, all evidence suggests this is true.

Can the effects of natural selection be seen? YES they can been seen. For instance, look in any major magazine or watch the evening news, and you'll see stories about disease causing bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. Those disease organisms are undergoing natural selection and evolving toward resistance.

Another rather too common misconception is that evolution and natural selection are random. There is nothing random about either. Once life started down a path, it had to follow that path. You're not going to have children that sprout wings. THAT would be random (and awesome), because you don't have the capability of passing that characteristic on to your children (maybe in a few hundred generations....).

Mutation is somewhat random - but is strongly constrained by the ability to survive (an organism with a random mutation that leaves off the head of an organism, isn't going to live long enough to reproduce, which is a VERY strong constraint) as well as by what genes it has to work with (you CAN'T make feathers from fur in one mutation, too much has to change in physiology and anatomy to make them).

Within those limits, our children have to look something like us. They will be genetically different, but they must be similar. Each generation will be somewhat different than it's parents, but it will be different. Add up those changes-- not random changes, but small changes, directed by natural selection.