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(Below are the comments made by Mike Maidenberg, Vice President and Chief Program Officer of the Knight Foundation, at the Future of the First Amendment Study press conference January 31 at the Freedom Forum in Arlington, Va.)

We're here today to help launch a movement so that our schools and our freedoms are not in conflict.

I'm honored to stand here representing the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Knight's journalism program has a global reach and clear goals: To protect and expand press freedom and to encourage journalism excellence.

Knight Foundation was founded by Jack and Jim Knight, two brothers who were brilliantly successful in the newspaper business. While the foundation is known for supporting journalism training and education with 170 active journalism grants and a grant history of more than $253 million in journalism funding, we are also actively engaged as a local funder in 26 U.S. communities where the brothers had business interests. We're there over the long haul because Jack and Jim believed in giving back to the communities.

As our partners can attest, we also value partnership. The ?Future of the First Amendment'' study presented today represents the work of some of the best and most dedicated minds in the field. Produced by University of Connecticut researchers and funded by Knight Foundation, it is the largest survey of its kind about what American high school students know about our first freedoms.

What they know and think is distressing; you'll hear more details shortly from our research partners, David Yalof and Kenneth Dautrich of the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy and Center for Research & Analysis.

The results are both timely and sobering, but there is a hopeful message. The First Amendment rights would be universally known if they were classroom staples.

The High School Initiative's goal is ambitious ? to convince thousands of school districts across the United States to care about student media and the First Amendment. Our friends at the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation have had some promising and early success in re-energizing high school journalism where it has fallen out of practice, or fallen out of favor. So far, the initiative has affected 1,000 student media outlets ? starting nearly 400 and improving an additional 600. The study confirmed that a fifth of the nation's approximately 17,000 high schools, or more than 3,000 schools, have no student media at all, and an estimated 4,000 have substandard student media.

But in order to persuade the school districts to start or shore up student media, use news in classrooms and increase First Amendment education, teachers and administrators and even school boards need hard evidence.

This study provides that evidence. It shows that most principals think their schools are doing a good job of teaching the First Amendment. It also shows that too few understand or value what they claim to teach.

The study hopes to help principals, teachers and students everywhere understand why and how they might improve.

There are organizations that can help strengthen or expand student media and protect the First Amendment in schools. Some are Knight partners:

J-Ideas, the Journalism Institute for Digital Education, Activities and Scholarship at Ball State . You'll hear later from Warren Watson, executive director of J-Ideas.

ASNE through highschooljournalism.org. Executive Director Scott Bosley is here. Also here is Diana Mitsu Klos, senior project director of ASNE's High School Journalism Project.

RTNDA, through its High School Electronic Journalism Project; Barbara Cochran and new project director Carol Knopes.

And the Student Press Law Center, represented today by Executive Director Mark Goodman, which provides free legal information and low-cost educational materials for student journalists.

In the long run, it will take educational and scholastic journalism leaders working together to promote the value of the First Amendment and media literacy in our schools.

The results of this study kicks off a two-day summit of those leaders. Their goal is to create an action plan so that our schools and freedoms are not in conflict.

The First Amendment and public education are two cornerstones of American democracy. Democracy wins when the two work together.

If, as President Bush said in his inaugural address, the U.S. priority is exporting freedom around the world, we should start in our own classrooms and make sure students understand the freedoms afforded to them and are willing to defend them.

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