On Feb. 22, student journalists of The Oracle and their adviser sued Mountain View High School’s principal and its school district due to allegations of censorship and intimidation over an investigative piece about student-on-student sexual harassment.
It was filed by the mother of Hanna Olson ’25, Hayes Duenow ’23, and their former adviser Carla Gomez. In their case, they alleged principal Dr. Kip Glazer pressured The Oracle to significantly “water down” information about the sexual harassment–such as student anecdotes–and “unlawfully retaliated” against its publication by removing Gomez as adviser and the Introduction to Journalism course, in order “to protect [Glazer’s] own reputation and shield the school’s harassers.”
They hope the lawsuit will compel the school district to allow the students the ability to publish an uncensored version of the article, reinstate Gomez as adviser and restart the canceled journalism course.
Naomi Lin ’24, Editor in Chief of The Crusader, believes that “The lawsuit is justified….By censoring students for covering this topic, the school officials are not only preventing awareness from being raised but suggesting their own disregard for addressing instances of sexual harassment.”
Before publication, according to the lawsuit, Glazer came to the journalism class and told student reporters they ought to portray the school in a “positive light” and that the paper should be “uplifting” to the school. She also allegedly told the reporters who worked on the story that there would be “catastrophic consequences” from publishing the article and demanded to read over the story before it was published.
This practice, called prior review, is condemned and deeply frowned upon by most journalism education groups in the country, according to the National Scholastic Press Association.
The suit alleges that Glazer violated California’s New Voices law and California’s Education Code 48907, which protect student journalists from administrative censorship and their advisers from retaliation upon standing up for the student’s First Amendment rights.
However, those laws only protect public schools. According to Jeff Isola, an AP US Government and Politics teacher at Riordan, “In private schools, those rules simply don’t apply.”
“Private schools have much more autonomy in terms of what they choose to enforce, especially when it comes to the doctrine of the Catholic Church…public schools have a greater burden of proof to justify censorship than a private school.
“Private schools can say ‘no’, and that’s it,” he concluded.
Paul Kandell, a board member for the Journalism Education Association of Northern California and a Mountain View resident who’s gone to the school board about the situation, said, “It’s not something that I’ve seen happen before in California…
“If the result goes the students way, I think this will be a landmark case that lots of people pay attention to in the same way we know of landmark stories for…Tinker and Hazelwood.”
