San Francisco Superior Court Judge Christine Van Aken is expected to rule shortly on a request by Lowell High School teacher Eric Gustafson for a court order restoring him to his positions as journalism teacher and faculty advisor to the student newspaper.
In June, Gustafson sued the San Francisco Unified School District and Superintendent Maria Su, alleging he was removed from these positions against his will in unlawful retaliation for student articles to which the school administration objected. In particular, according to Gustafson, dating to 2023, current and prior Lowell administrators asked Gustafson to share student-written articles prior to publication because the reaction to their publication caused the administrators extra work. The requests, which Gustafson referred to the students for their response or to which he objected on his own behalf, followed articles in The Lowell about student drug use and complaints that administrators did not respond adequately to student reports of unwelcome teacher attention.
School district administrators dispute the allegations and defend his transfer as a decision within their discretion to make. In the litigation, school administrators have criticized what they describe as the declining quality of student writing in the newspaper. Notably, Gustafson contends that the criticisms were never presented to him before his removal from the journalism teaching assignment. In fact, the October 2024 issue of the student newspaper in which one of the articles appeared won an award from the Journalism Education Association of Northern California.
Gustafson also cites California’s Journalism Teacher Protection Act, which specifically prohibits prior restraint of student journalism and protects journalism teachers from being reassigned solely in response to acting to protect student journalist rights. His effort to return to teaching journalism and advising student journalists on The Lowell has gained the support of students and sparked a resolution approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in support of student journalism and upholding free speech. In May, the San Francisco Press Club joined other professional journalists to “denounce the school for failing to respect core journalistic principles.”
School administrators have criticized what they describe as the declining quality of student writing in the newspaper, yet one 2024 article won an award from the Journalism Education Association of Northern California.
California law did not always recognize students’ free speech rights or protect teachers who did so. Sixty years ago, a national high school students’ activism network emerged in response to, and as part of, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. Historian Aaron G Fountain Jr. has written a new book, High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America that highlights surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) of students at Lowell High School, Washington High School, Lincoln High School, and even some junior high schools.
Fountain, currently on a San Francisco speaking tour, has filed over 2,100 Freedom of Information Act requests and uncovered hundreds of pages of FBI files, an agency he ironically concludes is one of the greatest archivists of the 1960s history of student activism. He shared eye-opening details of his findings at a Book Passage talk on Sunday to an audience that included some of the former student participants themselves. According to Fountain, in February 1965, an underground student newspaper, The Activist Opinion, began circulating at Woodrow Wilson High, Lowell High, and an independent school, Lick Wilmerding. It offered student commentary on U.S. intervention from Vietnam to the Caribbean, racial segregation in San Francisco schools, and the activities of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee. By April, the newspaper had been termed “propaganda” by school district officials and forwarded to the FBI by, among others, the parents of student activists. In Fountain’s telling, FBI and SFPD informants had greater awareness of the situation than school district officials. Superintendent of Schools Harold Spears banned the publication’s distribution. Like most bans of this kind, Spears’ prohibition increased interest and circulation of the publication. Local and federal investigations involving San Francisco school students continued for at least two years. As the student antiwar movement continued to grow, local FBI counterintelligence operations in the Bay Area continued until 1972.
Fountain was joined at the book talk by Steve Wasserman, currently the publisher of Heyday Books and a leader of student activism in the 1960s at Berkeley High School. Wasserman noted the increased protection of student journalism and the vast array of communications resources available today, in contrast to the mimeographed and stapled underground news publications selling for 15 cents in the 1960s. But, he warned, the power of the government to monitor and suppress speech and press greatly surpasses what they faced as students.
Whether viewed from the perspectives of student voice, teacher employment rights, or school district discretion, a lot is at stake in Judge Van Aken’s ruling and in the entire Gustafson lawsuit.