Westword: Eighteen-year-old Travis Cantonwine is the editor-in-chief of the Delta Paw Print, the student news publication at Delta High School. He hopes to become a professional journalist after he finishes college, which he’ll start in the fall at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs — but he’s already learned some tough lessons about the news industry.

He got into the newspaper business because he wanted to be heard…but when it looked like the school district might start censoring the student paper, he silenced it until officials backed off.

In 2019, the Colorado Legislature passed a bill requiring schools that wanted to receive funds from the Comprehensive Human Sexuality Education grant program to implement a sex-education curriculum that did not emphasize abstinence as the primary form of preventing pregnancy and didn’t use stigmatizing language when teaching about gender stereotypes, sexuality or transgender people — if schools chose to discuss those subjects.

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