The Sequoia Union High School District, which has about 9,000 students in eight schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, agreed to pay $325,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging that it mishandled Jew-hatred, according to the Deborah Project.
“For years Jewish students have endured not only overt antisemitism, but their complaints about those experiences have been ignored or even maligned,” Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the nonprofit, told JNS.
The settlement “requires policies of transparency, unbiased decision-making and concrete protections from antisemitic indoctrination and bullying” by district students, teachers and administrators, Lowenthal Marcus said. (JNS sought comment from the district.)
The agreement, which lasts until June 30, 2029, calls on the district to pay the six families who sued $325,000 in legal fees and for emotional distress and other damages. JNS saw a copy of the settlement.
The district also agrees to list the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “controversial issue,” which means teachers will have to present the matter neutrally, without sharing their personal views on the subject.
Teachers in the district will also have to warn students not to draw conclusions on the subject without having all the relevant information.
The Deborah Project, a public-interest law firm, and Ropes and Gray represented the six families who sued the district in November 2024.
They alleged that the district was deliberately indifferent toward instances of Jew-hatred and that district officials “shifted blame onto the victims, refused to engage with concerned parents and used superficial ‘investigations’ to whitewash legitimate concerns.”
A neutral, independent decision-maker, or a curriculum expert that that person approves, will need to clear any supplementary instructional materials about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict used in the classroom, per the agreement.
“Parents get to see any materials that are going to be used in the classroom,” Lowenthal Marcus told JNS.
The settlement requires the district’s board to state explicitly in its policies that antisemitism is a barred form of discrimination.
The district’s definition of antisemitism also must include “the denial of the right of Israel to self-determination and self-defense, and holding Israel to a standard or behavior that other democratic nations are not,” Lowenthal Marcus told JNS.
“That’s huge,” she said. “It isn’t only when kids say, ‘heil Hitler’ or a teacher tells a Holocaust joke, as horrible as those are, and those generally are recognized already as being antisemitic.”
“But you can’t call Jewish kids, tell them that their families are committing genocide and you can’t say that Israel has no right to exist,” she told JNS. “That is verboten, and that has not been the case before.”
As part of the agreement, the district agrees to provide mandatory Jew-hatred training to administrators, teachers and staff and to provide yearly anti-hate programs for students.
The district also commits to provide at least one antisemitism lesson in world history classes at its schools.
The agreement also stipulates new ways that the district must handle discrimination complaints.
It will be required to hire a third-party investigator who has not worked for the district within three years of the complaint and who cannot have any other conflict of interest. The investigator will provide a report to the district and the complainant after the probe, and an independent decision-maker will review the findings and make a determination that will be provided to both the complainant and district officials, according to the agreement.
“It used to be that all the policies and all the control were essentially owned by the district and able to be used and manipulated by the district,” Lowenthal Marcus told JNS. “Now the students and the families have a degree of control.”
The district is not admitting to any wrongdoing under the settlement.
Lowenthal Marcus told JNS that the district is “going to go back and review the complaints that were filed that initiated this lawsuit.”
“That’s looking backward. Everything else is really looking forward, making new policies and requirements and putting teeth into what existed before,” she said. “There’s no more playing, ‘Well it depends on what you mean by X.’”
“It’s spelled out in the settlement,” she said.
A “neutral fact-finder” will determine if both sides are following the terms of the settlement, Lowenthal Marcus said.
