Are energy drinks healthy for teens? Should the voting age be lowered? Do school dress codes make sense? What is tanorexia? Should students be permitted to drive to high school? And, should it matter to high school students whether or not the school board president has children in the school system?

These are among the issues explored by high school newspapers during the past school year by student journalists hoping to get their voices heard by school administrators and the outside world.

And for some papers, including Mt. Lebanon High School's The Devil's Advocate and Baldwin High School's Purbalite, the stories led to major awards.

The Devil's Advocate received the All-State Award from the Pennsylvania School Press Association and a first place for overall publication in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Point Park University High School Journalism Contest.

Baldwin High School's Purbalite won a first place with special merit from the American Scholastic Press Association.

Faculty sponsors say high school journalism is alive and well and that their teenage staff members are often quick to jump on perceived injustices. The biggest challenge, the sponsors say, is making sure the junior journalists get all of the information on an issue before they go to print.

"It's such a melodramatic age and so much of their life is fueled by rumor," said Casey Henry, the faculty sponsor for The Devil's Advocate. "You really have to push them to get the other side."

As an example, newspaper editors at Baldwin High School this year were ready to blast the school's administration for requiring students to walk outside through a parking lot to get from one end of the building to the other during the current renovation project.

Students had been voicing frustration because they weren't permitted to cut through the school's library, which is at the center of the building.

But after faculty sponsor Christine Kondrot prompted the editors to get the administration's side, they found that the security system to prevent books from being stolen from the library would be compromised if high volumes of students walked though the library with each class shift.

So instead of editorializing against the decision, the paper was able to inform students of the reason for their treks through the parking lot.

In most districts contacted for this story, students must be enrolled in journalism classes in order to be on the newspaper staff. Most of the faculty sponsors are English teachers and some have either journalism experience or have taken some courses.

But funding and administrative oversight of the papers varies by district, as does the quality of the product.

At Peters Township, the school board provides full funding for the high school paper and at Keystone Oaks High School, most of the $5,000 in annual funding comes from the district, with the exception of revenue from ads that come in for the prom issue, said faculty sponsor Kim Smykal.

But in Baldwin and Upper St. Clair, students sell ads and hold additional fund-raisers such as chocolate, bakery and food sales to raise the money necessary to put out the papers. In Baldwin, staff members must also sell 25 copies of each edition of the paper.

"We run this as a business. This is to teach the students how to work for a company," Ms. Kondrot said. "They take responsibility for sinking or succeeding."

Each edition of the Purbalite, which has color photos on the front and back page and sometimes inside, costs between $800-$1,000 depending on its size. This year five editions were printed.

In Upper St. Clair, where the newspaper is black and white, the annual budget is about $5,000 and students raise all of it, said faculty sponsor Caty DeWalt. Free printed copies are distributed to all high school students and the paper is also available online at the district's Web site.

On most of the newspaper staffs, the students not only write stories, but also get involved in layout, headline writing and editing. The faculty sponsors do the final edits.

As for administrative oversight, at Upper St. Clair, Principal Michael Ghilani reviews the paper's contents before it goes to print. But at Mt. Lebanon High School, Principal Ron Davis gives Mrs. Henry editorial control over the newspaper.

That wasn't always the case in Mt. Lebanon. Two years ago, then principal Zeb Jansante pulled an editorial from The Devil's Advocate that criticized the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's coverage of the vulgar "Top 25 of 2006."

The list included the names and photos of 25 girls who were students at Mt. Lebanon High School and ranked them based on scores given for their breasts, buttocks and faces.

In place of the original editorial, The Devil's Advocate ran an editorial complaining that it had been censored by the principal.

Mrs. Henry, a former reporter for the Associated Press who was off on maternity leave from the district at the time the editorial was pulled, said she believes it is important for student newspapers to have complete autonomy from the administration.

She believes so strongly that The Devil's Advocate should have autonomy that she turned down the administration's offer to have an online edition of the student newspaper because it would have required administrative review of the content posted to the Web site. The district provides about one quarter of the paper's $8,000 annual budget.

Ms. DeWalt in Upper St. Clair said she doesn't mind the principal's review of the paper's contents. "It's more an issue of protecting the kids than the administration, Ms. DeWalt said, adding that the principal has allowed articles and editorials that are critical of the administration to run in the paper.

The state school code says that administrators can censor a student newspaper only if the publication could cause a significant disruption of the school day, said Wanda Pletcher, president of the Pennsylvania School Press Association.

"But what causes significant disruption is up to everyone's discretion," said Mrs. Pletcher, who is the faculty advisor for the newspaper at Altoona Area Junior High School.

Faculty advisors to high school newspapers are in a tough spot, Mrs. Pletcher said, because they work for the administration of the school districts.

"Teachers have to be careful because they need their jobs. There's a fine line that you have to watch," Mrs. Pletcher said.

Nicole Sitler, faculty advisor for the Peters Township High School Smoke Signals agrees: "You don't want to undermine school policy. On the flip flop if there is a very legitimate point that needs to be brought up then you want to do that," Mrs. Sitler said.

Mrs. Sitler acknowledged that most of the stories that appear in Smoke Signals are features rather than hard news stories.

But, the paper did a series of articles on what had been limited access to the high school library and effected some change. "There were only a limited number of passes so people who really wanted to do legitimate work couldn't get them," Mrs. Sitler said.

So the policy was changed to make an unlimited number of passes available, but that didn't really work either, Mrs. Sitler said, because too many students flooded the library causing disruptions.

Now, however, the administration is working to get more staff in the library so that it can serve more students.

At Chartiers Valley High School, the newspaper is called The Ant and its staff wrote stories about high prices in the cafeteria that prompted adjustments, said sponsor Alan Welding.

The Ant staff of about 40 students in two journalism classes produced 16 editions of the paper this year. It was funded solely through advertising revenue and sales of the paper, Mr. Welding said.

Among the issues covered in recent editions of Upper St. Clair's St. Clarion was "tanorexia" a condition discovered in a Wake Forest University study that found tanning beds can produce endorphins that give people who use tanning beds a "high" of sorts. The article outlined the dangers of frequent use of tanning beds and the likelihood of becoming addicted to it.

The St. Clarion has editorialized more than once about the district's policy that high school students cannot drive to school unless they work directly after school or are responsible for the care of a younger sibling.

But it's had no affect on the policy, which was put into effect in the 1970s after a student died on school property in a car accident," Ms. DeWalt said.

In Mt. Lebanon, student journalist Sarah Mervosh said she spent about 30 hours reporting and 10 hours writing a lengthy piece for the February issue about school director Mark Hart, who had been elected board president in December. The story won first place for news writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Point Park University High School Journalism Contest.

The article questioned how Mr. Hart could make positive changes for students in the district when he chose not to send any of his four school-age children to the district's schools.

It also talked about the board president's failure to file statements of financial interest for 2005 and 2006 on time and rehashed a discussion from a July 2007 school board meeting during which Mr. Hart objected to the renewal of a three-year contract with athletic director John Grogan. The contract was renewed in a 6-3 vote.

The article, she said, put her in a difficult position because some of Mr. Hart's supporters are friends of hers who play on a club soccer team that he coaches. She quoted some of the girls in the story and afterward said she invited the girls to write letters to the editor, but they didn't take her up on the offer.

"I tried to report it fairly and let the facts speak for themselves," Sarah said.

In addition to Sarah's article, The Devil's Advocate staff wrote an editorial about Mr. Hart, which among other things, asked that he create a student advisory board "to give him a better perspective on student life."

The Devil's Advocate, along with the Keystone Oaks High School newspaper, The Keynote, covered the "National Day of Silence" held April 25. It is a day where students who participate remain silent to bring attention to the bullying and harassment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students in schools.

The silence is to reflect the silence those students must keep in order to avoid bullying.

The writer of the The Keynote story, Taylor Russell, wrote about how he participated in the day by remaining silent and wearing a shirt that read "Support Equality." He said a number of his friends tried to get him to break his silence, but he didn't.

The Devil's Advocate carried an interview with an openly gay student and wrote about how students in support wore armbands and didn't speak for the day.

Another hot topic for school papers is teens consumption of caffeine.

In a story about energy drinks, Melissa Unger, an editor-in-chief of Baldwin High School's Purbalite newspaper wrote: "Caffeine is the new sleep." She examined teens' consumption of coffee and energy drinks such as "Red Bull" and "Monster" and interviewed teens who said they had no idea that caffeine was harmful to their health. She explained that if teens consume it in high doses they could face the risk of dehydration, seizures and heart problems.

Smoke Signals also took on the caffeine issue by having a reporter hang out at Starbucks to observe what kinds of caffeinated beverages Peters students were buying. The article also included information on how too much caffeine could affect students' health, Mrs. Sitler said.

In the Clairton School District, the high school newspaper, The Clairtonian Post, is simply a stapled bundle of color photocopied pages that includes hand-drawn cartoons and puzzles. But the journalistic voice is still there.

Reporter Trevor Miles, wrote a column called "I wonder..." and the topic was why male students were getting sent home for wearing certain types of footwear when female students were not.

Trevor wrote that while he was sent to the principal's office for wearing his "black Nike slides" to school, female students wearing flip-flops were not disciplined. He argued that the dress code should be uniformly enforced.

Most of the faculty sponsors said they allow the students to chose what stories they want to report on and sometimes they tend to shy away from big controversies because they stories are so much work.

But, Mrs. Henry said, it is the sponsors' duty to make sure the students do the work required to make the stories they choose fair and balanced.

"The only way they deserve the freedom of the press is if they use it properly," she said.