Try to find the St. Francis (Minn.) High School newspaper online. You can't.

The lack of Internet presence - a striking absence for any under-20 publication these days, much less an award-winner like The Crier - is the result of a censorship battle that has left the paper in a First Amendment netherworld.

In January, the principal of the 1,900-student school, located on the outer edge of the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs, barred publication of a photograph depicting a student tearing up what appeared to be an American flag.

The paper protested, the administration dug in its heels, and outside media and free-speech groups took notice. Months later, a committee of student editors and administrators have yet to resolve the matter, and a lawsuit remains a possibility, albeit one the editor would like to avoid.

"Our goal is not to have (the paper) shut down, but we don't want to hire a lawyer," says Editor Eric Sheforgen, a senior. "We're still apprehensive. I'm not really sure what their intentions are."

The monthly school-funded newspaper paper continues to come out - sans controversial content - but its website is blank. Its decades-old mission statement, declaring "The Crier is an open forum for student expression," now carries a 40-point stamp across it: "Under review."

The long-term outlook for the paper, its staff and faculty adviser are as hazy as the Hazelwood versus Tinker legal interpretations that each side - the administration versus the student editor - is clinging to.

"I'm guessing it's going to come down to the status of The Crier as an open forum or not an open forum," says Principal Paul Neubauer. "The Crier believes they're an open forum and I guess the district believes they're not an open forum. Once we decide the status of open forum, then we'll be able to set procedures that either allow student freedoms or provide safeguards for the district."

It all started with a school play performed earlier in the school year that depicted a class full of students shredding the Stars and Stripes.

Among the numerous layers of irony:

• The play was a Cold-War era tale warning of the dangers of totalitarianism.
• The student actors and drama teacher insist it wasn't really a flag, but a prop made of bunting.
• The picture of the flag-shredding scene hung in a school hallway for months, so even many who never saw the play already had seen the photo before it was censored.
• In The Crier, the banned photo was to be accompanied by a story about freedom of expression, pegged on the principal's recent removal of the picture from the hallway.

Neubauer said the photo might offend veterans in the community, which lies on the frontlines of suburban expansion into the once-rural area. Superintendent Ed Saxton stood by Neubauer, publicly likening the large image to a quote being taken out of context; that the accompanying caption, story and editorial attempted to put the issue in context wasn't enough, he said.

The paper protested with big blue box on A1, a bold placeholder for a picture that would soon be seen on local TV screens and in the pages of the state's two largest dailies, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. But it has yet to run in The Crier.

Administrators cited the 1988 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, which laid out that educators have the final say over high school-funded newspapers, such as The Crier. But they can only use such prior restraint in the interest of educational purposes, the court said.

True, administrators said, they had rarely, if ever, exercised that right, and Neubauer said in the seven years he had been at the school as principal and assistant principal, he had never instituted a prior-review policy.

The official school board policy reads: "Official school publications are free from prior restraint by officials except as provided by law." That last bit could read "except as provided by Hazelwood," administrators argued. That policy is now also under review.

Hazelwood also says its strict standards to not apply to "public forums," and that's where Sheforgen jumped in.

Armed with a letter from the Student Press Law Center, Sheforgen argued The Crier had been a public forum, both in practice and in the words of its mission statement printed in each issue.

Hazelwood didn't apply, he said. Instead, he pointed to the other operative Supreme Court case: Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist. That decision says schools can only censor student expression if it's "to avoid substantial interference with school discipline or the rights of others."

The local ACLU, while not representing the paper or the students, sided with Sheforgen.

With graduation around the corner, Sheforgen says he hopes the uncertainty can be resolved within a month or so.

"They seem to be fishing for reasons to cut down the forum," he says. "We're trying to show them: This is the best way to support the First Amendment."

Earlier this spring, Iowa State University's Greenlee School of Journalism awarded the paper its Champions of the First Amendment award.

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Dave Orrick is a staff writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Previously, he was legal affairs writer for the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago. In high school in his native Massachusetts, shortly after Hazelwood came out in 1988, he published an underground newspaper on what was then a new technology: the desktop computer.