Anti-harassment training aimed at strengthening protection of
gay students
Anti-harassment training aimed at strengthening protection of gay students
By CAROL HOLZGRAFE
Staff Writer
Parents, students and district employees learned details of the settlement of a harassment lawsuit between six former Morgan Hill School District students and the district Tuesday.
As a result of the settlement, Alana Flores, Freddie Fuentes, Jeanette Dousharm and three other former students will split $560,000 and see all MHSD staff and seventh and ninth grade students undergo separate training designed to combat anti-gay harassment. Another $540,000 will be used to cover costs and the students’ attorney’s fees, Superintendent Carolyn McKennan said after the announcement.
During the five years the lawsuit has wound its way through the courts, only former student Flores was willing to have her name used publicly. At Tuesday’s hearing, Fuentes and Dousharm have added their names to hers.
McKennan said Flores would receive $150,000; Fuentes and Dousharm, $100,000 each; two unnamed plaintiffs $80,000 each and the final student, $50,000.
The American Civil Liberties Union announced the out-of-court settlement of the five-year-old Flores vs. MHUSD case at a press conference in San Francisco Tuesday morning after the remaining details were worked out in the San Jose courtroom of federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James Ware.
MHSD trustee Shellé Thomas said that, in accepting the terms of the settlement, the district was not accepting any liability in the matter.
“This is not an admission of guilt,” Thomas said.
McKennan said the district decided to settle without going to trial because, if it went to trial and the district lost, they would be liable for the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees, an amount estimated to be $3 million.
The $1.1 million, McKennan explained, will be paid by a Joint Powers Authority the district belongs to, a consortium of school districts that join together, essentially to share risks – a self-insuring agency. She said school districts are generally unable to secure insurance policies that would shield them from such lawsuits.
The students involved in the lawsuit had accused the district of failing to protect them from harassment by fellow students over a period of years.
The students, through their original attorney, Diane Ritchie, have always maintained that their primary objective was not obtaining sums of money but to secure appropriate training so future students perceived to be gay would have an easier time in school.
“If (the district) would have agreed to training in the beginning, we (the lawsuit) would have gone away,” Ritchie said.
Not so, said Del Foster, a Morgan Hill attorney who has been on the school board since 1996.
“The original demand was for $3-4 million plus a complete revamping of our K-12 curriculum in order to include this kind of training,” Foster said.
Ann Brick, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California who worked on the case, told Judge Ware that the students were happy about the settlement.
“This is quite a moment for them,” Brick said.
McKennan said the costs of training will also be paid by the Joint Powers Authority, including release time for teachers.
“Training will occur during the work day,” McKennan said, “and substitutes will be hired, also paid for by the JPA.”
The amount was calculated in the settlement, she said.
Because pulling all teachers out of class at once would cause too much turbulence, McKennan said the training would be done over a period of time.
Ware asked that the district notify him when the staff training was scheduled because he wanted to attend if at all possible.
In April 2003 the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision, proclaimed as historic by the ACLU, insisting that Morgan Hill (and other) schools give equal protection to all students. By August 2003, the case having been appealed several times by the school district but never gone to trial, the two sides agreed to pursue a settlement.
The case, filed in April 1998 named district Superintendent Carolyn McKennan; Bob Davis who was interim Live Oak principal; Delia Schizzano, assistant principal; Maxine Bartschi, assistant principal at Live Oak; Rick Gaston, a Live Oak assistant principal; Larry Carr, now a city councilman but then president of the school board; Susan Choi, Del Foster, Jan Masuda, Tom Kinoshita, John Kennett and Rick Herder, all school board members; and Don Schaefer and Frank Nucci, principal and assistant principal, respectively, at Martin Murphy Middle School.
Ritchie explained why she thought the district fought the lawsuit for so long and refused to add anti-gay harassment training to the curriculum.
“Carolyn McKennan was unwilling to believe there were any gay students (in the district) or, if there were, could see no problems. Then she said, ‘We’re in a lawsuit and can’t make any changes.’”
Mark Davis, the district’s attorney, said the district did not think changes needed to be made, that their current course was enough.
McKennan has maintained throughout the suit’s course that staff and students did receive training and the district took sufficient actions to protect students. Her stance was repeated in a press release the district distributed Tuesday:
“MHUSD already provides training to staff and students regarding all forms of harassment, and as part of this agreement during the next few years, the district will supplement the student training with an annual 50-minute training that deals primarily with sexual orientation harassment.”
On Tuesday, both McKennan and Thomas said they were happy to put the lawsuit behind them.
“It was a good deal for both of us,” McKennan said. “Now we can move forward.”
The students were represented by the ACLU of Northern California, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the ACLU’s national Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, and cooperating attorneys Stacey Wexler, Christine Sun, and Jay Kuo of Keker & Van Nest, LLP in San Francisco, James Emery of San Francisco, Diane Ritchie of San Jose and Leslie Levy of Boxer and Gerson in Oakland.
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Previous stories on this lawsuit can be seen at www.morganhilltimes.com
