High school journalism is often seen as a gentle apprenticeship: a place where teenagers cut their teeth on post-game reports from Friday night football or incremental updates of a student-council race. But at 17, Myesha Phukan wanted to work on something meatier. As a student reporter for the Oracle at Mountain View high school, she and a group of student journalists began methodically digging into a pattern of on-campus sexual harassment that, the reporters believed, administrators weren’t handling effectively.
Over weeks of rigorous investigation, the Oracle amassed a substantial archive of evidence including screenshots, photos and witness accounts. The story investigated alleged on-campus offenders and consulted experts about the need for accountability when it comes to on-campus assault. When Phukan and her fellow reporters asked the school’s principal for comment about the administration’s perceived inaction, tensions escalated.
In several closed-door meetings, Phukan says she was warned that such an article could have “catastrophic” reputational repercussions, for the alleged offenders and the school. The original draft included descriptions of serious offenses, ranging from harassment, to attempted rape. According to Phukan, the administration stated their belief that the Oracle’s reporters should be concerned with casting the school in a “positive light”.
The reporters on the paper felt immense pressure to revise the story, which eventually they did. The name of an alleged repeat harasser was removed (with the administration citing fears of jeopardizing that student’s mental health) and critical details about on-campus assaults were also removed. Detailed accounts were replaced with more vague descriptions and quotes from female students and expert sources were pared back.
Despite these concessions, Phukan says, the school responded to the article by re-assigning the Oracle’s faculty journalism adviser, tenured teacher Carla Gomez, and slashing the school’s Introduction to Journalism course, citing low enrollment. In response, Phukan and Gomez called the Student Press Law Center (SPLC), a non-profit that defends the press freedoms of student journalists in the US. But it can come in the form of funding cuts, or intimidation.” The SPLC connected the student journalists with local legal counsel via their attorney referral network.
The Oracle’s journalists filed a lawsuit against the school, accusing the administration of “bullying, threatening and coerc[ing]” the journalist, and punishing their adviser through reassignment. The complaint, filed in the Santa Clara county superior court, accuses Mountain View’s principal, Kip Glazer, of exercising “her authority and position to exert enormous and unlawful pressure” over the paper and its writers. Their filings in the civil lawsuit claim that the administration’s actions stand in violation of both education code (in the case of censoring the students) and state labor law (in the case of reprimanding the newspaper’s faculty adviser).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
