Students at Snoqualmie Valley’s Washington High School will not face prior review and will publish their first issue Friday.

Meeting Thursday, Nov. 5 with district administrators, publication students and their adviser, Washington Journalism Education Education (WJEA) representative Fern Valentine reports the principal agreed to have a policy without prior review.

The news comes on the day the Valley Record, the local commercial paper, published a story saying school administrators would continue to prior review the student publication, which has a history of being an open forum.

Valentine, in an e-mail to the Center for Scholastic Journalism today, said, “The principal agreed to have a policy that did not involve prior review if the students would work with the local newspaper to make sure that their paper meets professional standards.”

Student editor Sean Byrnes, in a Facebook chat Nov. 6, said administrators agreed. Valentine has an audio recording of the meeting where administrators indicated they would not establish prior review.

Part of the agreement indicates the publication, Cat Tales, will work with a local paper on some ethical questions.

“Our administration stepped down on prior review entirely,” Byrnes said. “We’ve convinced the administration to allow us to publish under a similar paper’s policy of a nearby school. There would be no prior review at all, we would remain an open forum, and in cases that we thought might be out of journalistic ethic, we’d check with a local paper that has agreed to consult with us.”

Valentine said administrators and students also reached an agreement allowing students to publish their first paper Friday with the same open forum language as in previous years.

Students will then come up with a new policy modeled after policies Valentine showed them that do not include prior review.

“The principal said the superintendent had left it up to him to come up with a policy the students could accept, so we will see,” Valentine said. “They would like to have this done before the school board meeting Thursday, Nov. 13. Students promised to come up with one before Monday. At any rate, the open forum still exists and the first paper will come out under it.”

Students usually publish every two weeks but had suspended publication over the potential for prior review.

No one had asked for prior review or any change of policy with their award-winning yearbook.