A DeKalb High School student was suspended last Wednesday after posting fliers on school walls protesting nuclear testing.

Andy Shankman, a junior, was suspended for five days. He said he feels his constitutional rights of free speech and free press have been violated. However, DeKalb High School Principal Bernard Looney said Shankman was not suspended for posting the fliers, but for insubordination.

Shankman was posting fliers from the DeKalb County Freeze Campaign giving information about last Tuesday’s nuclear test bomb explosion in Nevada. It also asked readers to attend the Freeze rally Wednesday in the NIU Martin Luther King Commons.

Looney said students must have prior permission to post fliers in the school, and he said Shankman did not have permission. Last year, Shankman said he asked his principal about nine times for permission to post various literature and he was always refused. He said he had posted the fliers anyway and the principal had just taken them down. This year, he said he saw no point in asking for permission because he knew he would be turned down anyway.

Shankman began posting the Freeze Campaign fliers on a bulletin board Wednesday but was stopped by a teacher who ripped them down. “When the teacher asked me if I had permission, I said, ‘Yes, from the Constitution and the president of the United States,'” Shankman said.

Shankman said the teacher told him to wait in the lunchroom, and when the teacher came in with Vice Principal Steve Greenfield, Shankman left.

“Later when the teacher saw me and asked me my name, I said it was Leon Trotsky (a Russian revolutionary killed in Mexico in the 1940s),” Shankman said. The teacher took him to the main office to look up the name in the computer, “then asked me to spell it,” Shankman said. He said at that time, another teacher came into the main office and told his real name.

Shankman said the teacher took him to Greenfield’s office and when Greenfield arrived, Shankman said he asked to call his mother but Greenfield refused.

Shankman said Looney then arrived, and after about 10 minutes of asking numerous times for Looney to call his mother, the principal finally called. He said the principal said nobody was there. Later, Shankman said he found out the line was just busy and said the principal was lying.

“The principal told me to go to the detention room, but I said, ‘I want to be in your office when you tell my mother the facts,’ and the principal agreed. But when the principal finally talked to my mother, I was not in the room,” Shankman said.

Shankman’s mother, Kathleen Shankman, said she thinks things were mishandled on both sides. “I am not saying Andy should not have been putting up the fliers, he should have been,” she said.

Looney said he did not want to comment on the suspension because he did not want to violate “the student’s rights and privacy.” However, he said Shankman’s suspension was based not on putting up the fliers but for “conduct which was inappropiate, and disrespectful.”