In a lawsuit over alleged censorship of a student newspaper’s reporting on sexual harassment at Mountain View High School, a state court judge has rejected the district’s bid to end the case. Now, it heads to trial starting Nov. 23.
Former Oracle adviser Carla Gomez and student journalists Hanna Olson and Hayes Duenow allege the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District and Principal Kip Glazer violated California Education Code § 48907 — which limits censorship of student media — and state labor laws when Glazer pressured the students to change the story and then removed Gomez as adviser and eliminated a journalism class.
Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Eunice Lee denied the defendants’ motion for summary judgment on Oct. 20, rejecting the argument that the students waived their rights under § 48907 by changing their story at Glazer’s direction.
The defendants had also argued that the changes were allowed under the law because Glazer reasonably believed the story could be defamatory, but Judge Lee found that the plaintiffs raised enough disputed facts — including that Glazer herself testified that she didn’t think at the time that anything in the story was false — for the lawsuit to move forward.
“We’re ready and excited to go to trial,” said Jordyn Ostroff, an attorney representing the plaintiffs. “As the judge recognized, there’s already ample evidence to prove our clients’ case, to prove that a lot of the reasons given by the district and by Principal Glazer for their actions are kind of post hoc contextual reasons, and this is really censorship. This is really retaliation.”
California was the first of 18 states to pass what is now called New Voices legislation, which widely protects student journalists from administrator censorship. Several states, including California, also protect advisers from retaliation for refusing to censor their students.
“We hope that we will also show this at trial, which is that California provides really robust protections to student journalists, broader than a lot of other states, broader than federal law,” Ostroff said. “And that’s important, and it’s necessary to preserve students’ First Amendment rights.”
Students have long said Glazer insisted on changes to their article because it could cast the school in a negative light, according to a 2023 column by Myesha Phukan, a co-author of the article at the center of the lawsuit. Phukan is now an advocacy intern at the Student Press Law Center.
“There’s only specific enumerated reasons, like avoiding liability for defamation, for example, or if there’s going to be some kind of incitement to disrupt the school activities,” Ostroff said. “They can’t just limit speech to protect the school’s reputation, and I think that’s really important for students to know what their rights are.”
Four students on staff at the Oracle published an in-depth investigation in March 2023, detailing several instances of male students sending inappropriate and unsolicited messages, including nude photographs, to other students.
Gomez, Olson and Duenow said Glazer visited the class prior to publication, asking to get an advance copy of the newspaper. After reading about multiple accusations of sexual harassment at the school, Glazer pushed the Oracle staff to censor the article.
The students detailed at least a dozen substantive changes they made to the article after meeting with Glazer, who, the students said, told them on numerous occasions to write positively about the school.
Following the story’s publication, Glazer removed Gomez as adviser of the Oracle and cut the Introduction to Journalism course offered at the school. Glazer said she wanted to transition the journalism courses into a CTE Pathway, but SPLC previously reported that students saw this as an attempt to retaliate against their reporting and destabilize the school’s journalism program.
Gomez, Olson and Duenow sued the district and Glazer on Feb. 22, 2024, which was Student Press Freedom Day.
SPLC honored Mountain View High School journalists with the Courage in Student Journalism Award in November 2024, recognizing their perseverance against their administration’s censorship and determination to investigate student-on-student sexual harassment at their school.
SPLC reached out to the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District for comment on the judge’s ruling but did not get a response.
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