Neshaminy students get support from Calif.

News travels fast.

A day after word surfaced that the faculty adviser of Neshaminy High School's student newspaper was suspended for two days during a long-running dispute about use of the word Redskin, student journalists in California launched an online campaign to cover the salary she will lose on suspension.

Their webpage, titled "Free the Playwickian," also seeks to raise the $1,200 the Neshaminy School District cut from the student newspaper's activity fund.

Both actions, and the decision to strip the editor in chief of her title for a month, were apparent punishments for the newspaper's decision to reject for its June edition an op-ed piece containing Redskin.

The fund-raising effort, unknown to Neshaminy students until they were told by The Inquirer, demonstrates how far the debate over the school's team nickname, which a number of American Indians find offensive, has resonated beyond the Bucks County school. Within a few hours of being launched, the campaign had raised $225.

It also showed how, even a year after the issue surfaced, the debate in Neshaminy is unlikely to end any time soon.

Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, which has lobbied on the students' behalf, said state officials need "to take a hard look at interceding."

Student editors at Foothill Technology High School in Ventura, Calif., didn't go that far in setting up their Indiegogo fund-raising webpage.

But Canela Lopez, the school newspaper's editor in chief, said she was shocked to learn of the sanctions in Neshaminy.

Board members of the Foothill Dragon Press, she said, felt compelled to act out of kinship with their peers on the East Coast - despite having never met them.

"The main question I asked my board is, how would we feel if this happened to our publication?" said Lopez, 17. "We want to make sure we stand up."

She said she hoped that the page would spread on social media and that student journalists and advisers across the country would chip in.

Neshaminy administrators have not answered questions about the sanctions against adviser Tara Huber or the paper, and Superintendent Robert Copeland referred a request for comment Wednesday to a school district lawyer.

The attorney, Michael Levin, said the school board "appreciates the views of all of those who have made proposals and offered advice." He said opposition to the board's policy on publishing the word Redskin "has been carefully considered."

Gillian McGoldrick, the paper's editor in chief, said Wednesday that she had been stripped of her title for September, but has been allowed to continue working on the paper. "I don't have the role of being the editor in chief, technically," she said.

 For McGoldrick, that took a backseat to Wednesday's fund-raising efforts: "I can't even express how grateful I am."

609-217-8305

@cs_palmer