A lawsuit alleging censorship of the student-run newspaper, the Oracle, was filed against Mountain View High School principal Dr. Kip Glazer and the Mountain View-Los Altos School District on Feb. 22, Student Press Freedom Day.
The suit, filed by current Oracle Editor in chief Hanna Olson, former Oracle editor Hayes Duenow and former adviser Carla Gomez, centers on an Oracle in-depth article about sexual assault published last April, and how Dr. Glazer allegedly engaged in “bullying, threatening and coercion of student journalists.”
“[Glazer] bullied and intimidated the student journalists, with their adviser present, to censor the Article,” according to the suit filing.
The filing is the result of the MVLA board’s inaction on a previous demand letter from last September. The letter asked for an apology from Glazer, a written commitment against future censorship, reinstatement of the Introduction to Journalism class and the reassignment of Gomez to be Oracle’s adviser.
The suit was filed in the Santa Clara County Superior Court for violation of Education Code 48907, which states that public school students have the right to freedom of press and speech, except if it’s libelous, slanderous or obscene. California was the first state and is one of 17 states that legally protect student journalism.
The suit alleges that, due to administration involvement, the student journalists were pressured to remove crucial details from the article. According to the suit, Mountain View High assistant principal John Robell initially called Gomez to request that a student not be named as a “serial sexual harasser of other students.”
The administration continued to insert itself in the article’s production when Glazer visited Oracle’s class, asking they “write about MVHS in a positive light and should be uplifting MVHS,” according to the suit. Then, after requesting, and reviewing the article before publication, Glazer again met with the article’s writers and Gomez privately, “exert[ing] enormous and unlawful pressure on the student journalists to censor,” the suit said.
As a result, the article changed “substantively” as a result of Glazer’s involvement, according to the suit. Some of the 15 major changes listed in the filing include the removal of an anonymous abuser’s involvement in a potentially identifying program, the mentioning of an arranged “rendevous” in an attempt to rape a female student and a quote that criticized the administration’s lack of retribution for the abusers, according to the suit.
Although it has been around one year since the article was allegedly censored, the student journalists and adviser continue to seek legal retribution.
“It is important to me that all student journalists have a platform to vocalize their thoughts and opinions and spread information freely without feeling pressure from those in charge to change our stories to meet their priorities,” Duenow said in a press release.
The MVLA School District and Glazer had 30 days from Feb. 22 to respond to the lawsuit.
This is a developing story.
