A few years ago, a neighboring high school’s newspaper staff submitted a blank front page to the school’s administration to be approved. It wasn’t.

They planned on publishing an issue with articles about teen pregnancy, shoplifting and honors students admitting to smoking and drinking. Administrators said no, so the staff submitted a blank page with an explanation to readers about how they had been censored and why there was no story.

We just completed the 67th volume of Torch and the seventh issue this school year in which we have included controversial topics such as sexual abuse, new and more relaxed drinking ticket policies, gender-neutral bathrooms and a club poster vandalized with racist words and symbols.

Administrators do not read our stories before publication, nor do they know the topic of any articles before they are published unless we tell them. We have one teacher who advises us, but we generate every story idea and we make the final decisions. Torch is a student-run newspaper, not a school newspaper.

It is worth remembering that we do not face the censorship that more than 50 percent of high school newspapers are subject to, according to a survey of student journalists at the 2013 National High School Journalism Convention.

One purpose of journalism, inside and outside high school, is to educate citizens so they can make decisions in a democracy. It may sound like we’re taking ourselves too seriously, and maybe not every issue of Torch upholds the visions of the founding fathers when they called for a free press, but we try to take our role seriously. We have our administrators to thank for trusting us to serve the same purposes a professional newspaper should.

Torch is the open forum that Glenbrook North deserves where students can express themselves on important topics, and this isn’t exclusive to the staff. It is also a resource for students to write letters to the editor to criticize, compliment or comment on GBN. We only wish we had gotten more letters to the editor.

Either way, we’ll be back next year with a new staff, new conflicts to cover and the opportunity to write about them.