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A recently filed lawsuit alleges that Mountain View High School’s principal coerced student journalists to censor an article about sexual harassment last school year and reassigned the staff advisor in retaliation for trying to protect her students.
Hanna Olson and Hayes Duenow, two students involved in producing the sexual harassment article, along with Carla Gomez, the advisor at the time, filed the suit against Principal Kip Glazer and the Mountain View Los Altos Union High School District in Santa Clara County Superior Court on Thursday, Feb. 22.
Sara Kopit-Olson brought the suit on behalf of her daughter, Hanna Olson, who is currently a senior at Mountain View High and one of the editors-in-chief of The Oracle, the student newspaper that published the article at issue in the suit. Duenow was a senior last school year who was one of the reporters on the article and is now a freshman in college.
Olson and Gomez originally threatened to sue the district last fall in a letter their attorney sent to the district.
The lawsuit seeks to compel the school district to allow students to decide whether to publish an uncensored version of the article; to reinstate Gomez as advisor and provide her back pay and damages; and to restart an introduction to journalism class that was canceled at the end of last school year.
The Oracle published the article online and in its print edition last spring, which detailed alleged instances of students sexually harassing their peers.
Ahead of its publication, Glazer met with students multiple times and “repeatedly and improperly pressured and intimidated the students to significantly water down their in-depth investigative piece so that Glazer could save face,” the lawsuit states.
After publication, Glazer announced that Gomez would be replaced as advisor, and that an introduction to journalism class would not be offered in the 2023-24 school year, which the lawsuit states were acts of retaliation for the sexual harassment article.
Glazer and Superintendent Nellie Meyer did not respond to emails requesting comment for this article. An attorney representing Gomez, Olson and Duenow also did not respond to a request for comment.
District officials have previously attributed the change in advisor to an effort to expand career technical education (CTE) classes, which are meant to prepare students for jobs, and the removal of the introduction to journalism class to declining enrollment.
The lawsuit challenges these explanations. According to the suit, Gomez is in the process of obtaining her CTE certification and an administrator told her that The Oracle isn’t a CTE course this school year. The suit also states that enrollment numbers for introduction to journalism were “the same as they had been the prior two years.”
According to the suit, ahead of the article’s publication, Glazer came to the journalism class and told student reporters that they should portray the school in a “positive light” and that the newspaper should be “uplifting” for Mountain View High. She also had multiple meetings with writers of the piece, the suit states, where she “used her authority and position to exert enormous and unlawful pressure on the student journalists to censor the Article.”
“The students, who are more likely than adults to be chilled by the pressure, power and authority of their principal, relented to the pressure Principal Glazer exerted on them and implemented extensive changes to the content and context of the article,” according to the suit.
These included omitting descriptions of certain graphic instances of alleged harassment, information about the extracurricular activity that a student accused of harassment was involved in, and a quote from a student who believed the school wasn’t holding a student accountable for his actions.
After concerns sprang up around possible censorship last spring, Oracle editors including Olson released a written statement that said there was no “direct censorship” of the article. But Olson told the Voice last fall that her views had since changed. Originally, she said she hadn’t wanted to cause more issues, but that with time to reflect, she believed Glazer’s conduct was wrong and constituted censorship.
In California, the state Education Code explicitly gives legal protections to student journalists. Administrators aren’t allowed to censor public school publications unless the content falls into specific prohibited categories, including being obscene, libelous, slanderous or posing a “substantial disruption” to school operations.
The lawsuit argues that the sexual harassment article doesn’t fall into any of these categories and that the district “unlawfully censored and/or coerced censorship of the Article based on its content and/or viewpoint.”
California education code also prohibits schools from retaliating against advisors “solely” for protecting student journalists who are acting within the law. The lawsuit alleges that the district’s treatment of Gomez ran afoul of these protections.