Nicholas Flores, an English teacher at Canoga Park Senior High School, in the public Los Angeles Unified School District, wrote that “there are no multiple perspectives in a genocide, and to pretend there are makes us perpetrators of it,” according to emails that the North American Values Institute shared exclusively with JNS.
Mika Hackner, director of research at the institute, told JNS that “Mr. Flores is entitled to his personal views, even if, as in this case, they have no basis in fact and are offensive.”
“What Mr. Flores is not entitled to do is present his political opinions as settled fact in the classroom or to present only one side of a contested issue to his students,” she said.
The public school district is the country’s second largest, with about 550,000 students in more than 1,500 schools and centers. According to the emails that JNS reviewed, which the institute obtained via records requests, Flores was referring to an alleged “genocide” carried out by the Jewish state.
On Nov. 19, 2024, shortly after the one year anniversary of Oct. 7, Flores wrote that his “number one learning objective” is to question and be “critical of dominant systems, structures and narratives.”
“As educators, it’s incumbent on us to provide students with the intellectual and material tools to unlock deeper, more perceptive insights into themselves and the world around them,” he wrote. “That said, I strongly disagree that there are ‘multiple perspectives’ to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and that we should be open to hearing from the ‘other side.’”
“What could possibly come from ‘hearing out’ and ‘making space’ for the oppressor?” he wrote. “In fact, I think allowing space for the oppressor’s perspective does nothing but legitimize and perpetuate their ideologies and operations.” (JNS sought comment from the district, the school and Flores.)
The United States does not recognize a state of “Palestine.”
The email was part of a group, which Jewish Teachers Los Angeles obtained via a California Public Records Act request, and which the North American Values Institute shared with JNS.
Amy Leserman, a retired teacher in the district and chair of Jewish Teachers Los Angeles, told JNS that the group filed the public records act request last year after hearing from a teacher at the school.
The institute said that the emails show that teachers at the school used the Students for Justice in Palestine group on campus as “a shell organization to carry out their own protest actions and activism on campus” and “the classroom as a tool for activism.”
In the 2024 email, Flores wrote that when he teaches “Night,” the memoir by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, he tells his students that there’s “nothing valid or redeemable about the Nazi perspective.”
Flores also wrote that he doubts “our Jewish students and colleagues would appreciate us ‘hearing out’ the Nazi POV,” point of view, “or ‘both sides-ing’ the Holocaust.”
The emails that Jewish Teachers Los Angeles received included one between the school principal, Nidia Castro, and Laura Pinho, a dance teacher at the school who said in a June webinar that she married a Gazan man to help him obtain U.S. citizenship. She was also a co-sponsor of the Students for Justice in Palestine club.
In a Jan. 28, 2025 email, Castro wrote to Pinho that people had complained that a student’s school announcement that morning was politically “charged” and “triggered pain from trauma when the Holocaust was mentioned.” Castro wrote that the student told her that Pinho had written the announcement for her.
“Please do not help her even to summarize, as that goes against the memo for club sponsors where it states that sponsors cannot have a participatory role,” Castro wrote to Pinho. (JNS sought comment from Pinho.)
Leserman, of Jewish Teachers Los Angeles, told JNS that a teacher told her that the announcement accused Israel of “genocide” and compared the Jewish state to Nazis on the day after International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
She also heard that there was an SJP student leader who gave an announcement the week before denigrating Israel. “It was a repeated violation,” Leserman told JNS.
Pinho wrote in an April 2024 email that she urged one of her dance students to perform a spoken word rendition of the poem “If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer. She wrote that the poem is “not on one side or the other.”
Alareer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, told the BBC shortly after Oct. 7 that the Hamas-led attacks were “legitimate and moral” and “exactly like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.”
NAVI stated in its documentation of the emails that the poem “only mentions Gazans” and that “Pinho acknowledges that the performance was originally supposed to take place at her church for an educational event titled ‘Life in Occupied Palestine,’ belying the claim that the piece is meant to be neutral.”
“She uses her role as a dance instructor at the school to teach children primarily her view of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, it would seem,” Hackner told JNS.
Other emails show that Pinho “took a stab” at a constitution draft for the Students for Justice in Palestine club and that she was suggesting what to discuss at meetings, including organizing a walkout and contacting a leader at Code Pink, an anti-Israel protest group, for input on the club and other school matters.
Leserman told JNS that one of the emails suggests “trying to involve students in a larger national action and handing out literature.”
“Clubs are supposed to be student-led for student interest and student benefit, supervised by an adult because we don’t leave students to their own devices on campus,” she said. “This was simply a case of straightforward adult indoctrination of children and organizing of children for the adults’ purpose.”
She thinks the district needs “a published policy and statement on political neutrality in the classroom.”
“They have one very well-hidden bulletin. They have no official statement on political neutrality,” Leserman told JNS. “There’s a statement saying that it’s state policy that if an issue has a politician’s name or a bill number, the teachers can’t take a stand on it. But there is no expectation that teachers would take a stand on international policies, so that does not exist.”
Hackner told JNS that “during school time, we really have to uphold an idea of neutrality, and that it is not the role of a teacher to bring their own personal political views into the classroom and to use the classroom as a mechanism to share or spread those views.”
