The Orange County School of the Arts, a public charter school with about 2,300 students, improperly handled a complaint alleging that a teacher created a hostile environment for Jews and Israelis, the California Department of Education said.
According to the Oct. 16 state ruling, which JNS viewed, StandWithUs filed a complaint in May 2025 alleging that between January and March of that year, an anti-Israel teacher “raised the Holocaust to teach about current events and immigration issues in the United States but did not teach the basic facts about the Nazis’ killing of Jewish people.”
The complaint also alleged that in April 2025, the teacher wore a shirt with a watermelon covering Israel, and that the watermelon graphic “has been popularized as a symbol for Palestinian solidarity and resistance,” per the state.
The school concluded the teacher’s conduct was not discriminatory. StandWithUs appealed.
The state found that the school didn’t interview students, who were in the teacher’s class from January to March 2025, or the teacher, leaving it without “sufficient findings of fact to determine if teacher nonetheless brought up the Holocaust in class and if so, whether it was done in an antisemitic manner.” (JNS sought comment from the school.)
Two students who had the teacher prior to that timeframe were interviewed and said that the teacher “brought up Israel even when irrelevant to the class’s curriculum” and portrayed “Israel as a ‘villain’ and caused students with Jewish and/or Israeli identities to feel unsafe in class,” the state said.
“Since the investigator had evidence that teacher brought up the Israel/Palestine conflict in class unrelated to curriculum, it is very possible that teacher also brought up the Holocaust during the January to March 2025 period even if not part of the curriculum,” the state said.
“There should have been investigative work done to determine whether teacher discussed the Holocaust during the January to March 2025 period and, if so, whether it was discussed in an antisemitic manner,” according to the state.
The school failed to provide additional information that the state requested, so StandWithUs appealed again. The state determined that nothing in the school’s findings contradicted the allegation that the teacher discussed the Holocaust to advance her personal agenda.
Regarding the shirt, the school found nothing to substantiate the allegation that the graphic could be seen while the teacher was on duty. But it determined that “while it may be true that the T-shirt was partially obstructed by a shawl, it is still evident that enough was unobstructed that witnesses were able to determine the full context of the shirt.”
The school didn’t say if the watermelon graphic was actually shaped like Israel. If it was, such a graphic could be viewed “as a message that Palestine should erase Israel,” the state said.
The state said that the school has until Dec. 15 to train all teachers on preventing discriminatory bias in the classroom, with a “specific emphasis on the current situation in the Middle East and antisemitism.”
Yael Lerman, director of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, said that California’s decision “acknowledges what Jewish and Israeli students repeatedly shared with leadership.”
“In today’s realities, the demonization of Israel, the inversion of Holocaust education and the placing of collective blame for the Israeli government’s actions on every Jewish person can cross the line into antisemitism and create a hostile environment for Jewish students,” she stated. “We will be watching closely to make sure the CDE enforces its order as necessary.”
