A Festering Fallbrook Awaits Next Hatchet Job

When Danny Gluesenkamp decided to publish an underground newspaper for his peers at Fallbrook High School back in September, 1984, he had what any educator would agree was an admirable goal: To simply “stir some stagnant brain cells into action.”

But when school officials got a glimpse of Gluesenkamp’s product, dubbed the Hatchet Job, they hardly welcomed it as a motivational tool. Instead, they suspended the novice publisher and his journalistic cohort, Philip Tiso, contending that the 12-page tabloid contained material that was obscene and libelous.

Administrators figured the matter would end there. It didn’t. Believing that their First Amendment rights to free speech had been violated, the two boys won the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union and sued the school district for $11.1 million.

Since then, a judge has ruled that administrators improperly disciplined the students and ordered the district to relax its policy governing off-campus publications. And recently, attorneys announced an unusual settlement that awarded the boys $22,000 and required the district to apologize for the suspensions and sponsor a workshop on free speech rights.

The students’ challenge--and particularly their victory--stunned this conservative hamlet of 27,466, where retired Marines and avocado growers live the tranquil life, surprisingly insulated from the bulldozer of growth plowing a path through most North County communities.

As one longtime resident put it, “Fallbrook is Mom, the flag, the Bible, and apple pie. When those kids dared to sue the school--to challenge their elders--they became anti-American in some people’s eyes.”

The legal battle that thrust this proud town under the glare of the media spotlight for more than a year apparently has ended. But here in Fallbrook, the fiery and often bitter debate over the widely publicized case rages on.

The editorial pages of the hometown newspaper continue to sizzle with letters alternately condemning and praising the teen-agers, and Tiso and Gluesenkamp--whose mother has received hate mail--say the air is still thick with community resentment over their cause.

The pair soon plan to release the third edition of the Hatchet Job but will not reveal the name of their printer for fear he’ll be “driven out of town.” Tiso said some former patrons of the local video store where he works no longer come in, “just because it’s me behind the counter.”

“The town hates us,” Tiso said. “Despite all the court rulings, most people still seem to think that we should be taken out to the woodshed and whipped for what we’ve done.”

It all started innocently enough. Gluesenkamp, an affable B-plus student who plans to pursue physics at UC Santa Cruz next year, wanted to have some fun and “combat student apathy” with a newspaper.

To get the Hatchet Job off the ground, Gluesenkamp sold advertisements to local businesses and sank about $200 of his own money into the project. Friends were then recruited to write “anything they wanted without fear of being edited,” Gluesenkamp recalled.

Tiso, now editor of the official school paper, the Tomahawk, was intrigued. A tall, thin, pensive 18-year-old who hopes to become a foreign correspondent, Tiso thought the Hatchet Job offered an opportunity to “write some free-form, stream-of-consciousness stuff that wouldn’t really fit with the format of the Tomahawk.”

Press time arrived and several hundred copies of the paper rolled off a Xerox machine provided by a friend’s mother. The rather crudely fashioned publication featured political commentary, cartoons and generally offbeat musings--all penned by students using pseudonyms.

The Hatchet Job also contained profanity, sexually explicit language and material lampooning school district officials.

When Principal Henry Woessner saw the publication, he was appalled: “I felt it contained some gross obscenities that were extremely offensive and degrading to women and inappropriate for a high school campus.”

In addition, Woessner concluded that two items--one of them a photo caption suggesting that School Board President Wayne Miller, former U.S. Education Secretary Terence Bell and Rep. Ron Packard were engaged in a drug deal--were libelous.

In a recent interview, Woessner, a soft-spoken man who has piloted Fallbrook High School for 17 years, said he would have “gladly helped” the boys produce their newspaper had they “omitted the libel and obscenity.” He described the boys as “good students, academically,” and even recommended Tiso for a summer journalism program after the dispute had erupted.

The journalists’ peers, meanwhile, appeared to have mixed reactions to the fledgling publication. John Ritter, the student representative to the school board, said the use of “those obscene words” was unnecessary and “hurt the paper’s credibility” on the 1,871-pupil campus.

Senior Cindi Sullivan said she found much of the paper “embarrassing” and “harsh” and objected to one article in which “every other word was the ‘F’ word.” Still, Sullivan said she believed Tiso and Gluesenkamp had the legal right to publish the paper, and other students praised the Hatchet Job’s creativity.

Woessner, however, deemed the paper “disruptive of the educational process.” Its architects, he concluded, would have to be punished in accordance with the California Educational Code.

Publisher Gluesenkamp, a bright, articulate youth who has competed on his school’s academic squad, took the news of his five-day suspension by Woessner hard.

“I was just a kid back then and I cried a lot over this,” recalled Gluesenkamp, now 18. “They told me I was a bad kid. They told me I’d done a terrible thing. They accused me of obtaining advertising fraudulently. I basically figured, ‘Well, authority says I’m bad so they must be right.’ ”

It wasn’t until a few days later, after Tiso had been summoned and suspended for two days, that Gluesenkamp began feeling a different kind of emotion.

“After we thought about it awhile, we started to think the school had really overreacted,” Gluesenkamp said. So, angry and fearing the suspensions might damage their chances in the college application process, the two students asked the school board to revoke their sentences.

Trustees, supported by the Fallbrook Ministerial Assn. and other community members urging them to crack down on the youthful offenders, would have none of it, and they took a stand in support of the principal’s action. Meanwhile, the San Diego chapter of the ACLU, alerted by a sympathetic local resident, rallied behind the students, who filed administrative claims totaling $11.1 million against the district.

The district rejected the claims and, likely expecting that a lawsuit would follow, went to court seeking a ruling that the suspensions were legal. The boys then filed a counterclaim, alleging that their constitutional rights had been violated. Charles Bird, an attorney with the prestigious San Diego firm Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps, stepped in to donate his services on behalf of the young journalists.

Last December, district officials lost a crucial round in the legal battle when Superior Court Judge Lawrence Kapiloff scolded the district for illegally suspending the youths. In addition, Kapiloff ordered administrators to rewrite a policy that had required students to obtain the principal’s permission before distributing publications at school.

“That kind of did us in right there,” Fallbrook Union High School District Supt. Robert Thomas recalled. “It was frustrating, because the judge really never ruled on the issue of whether or not the material was obscenity and unsuitable for publication.”

A trial to determine how much Tiso and Gluesenkamp would receive in damages was scheduled to begin in January. Instead, however, a creative settlement was negotiated by the district’s lawyer, Andrea Miller, and Bird, whose young clients said they were more interested in an apology than a hefty monetary award.

Under the settlement, announced in February, Tiso and Gluesenkamp received the school board’s expression of “regret for any inconvenience” caused by its actions as well as $22,000, most of which will be used to cover court costs and a donation to the ACLU.

District officials also were required to sponsor--and attend--a workshop on the First Amendment rights of free expression and the disciplinary questions that arise when they are exercised on high school campuses. That workshop will be held May 16 at Lawrence Welk Village.

News of the settlement unleashed a new flurry of passionate reaction in this rural town, which is tucked amid the rolling hills on Camp Pendleton’s southeast border, 15 miles from Escondido. Much of the outrage concerned what district officials considered a breach of trust by the ACLU in disclosing the amount of money awarded the students.

Under a “gentleman’s agreement” designed to steer public focus away from the monetary award, both parties agreed not to disclose the sum received by Tiso and Gluesenkamp. But a week after the settlement was announced, the ACLU issued a routine press release that inadvertently mentioned the $22,000 award.

“That wasn’t fair,” Woessner said. “It was my understanding that the amount was to be kept secret to protect the boys from criticism, because in this community there are people prone in that direction.”

Indeed. Even Tiso and Gluesenkamp, who say they have lost much of their naivete and become cynical during the past 18 months, were surprised by the harshness of their critics’ attacks.

“One guy forbade his daughter to go near us because we had sued the school district, and a lot of people called us Commie pinkos,” Gluesenkamp said.

Much of the response--in letters that have spiced up the editorial pages of the Fallbrook Enterprise for weeks--suggested that the court system had permitted the students to defy authority and win.

Rusty Fossati, a local real estate broker, wrote in one letter that the youths had “struck another blow against all that is ‘good’ in our culture” and “attacked Morality, Decency, Grace, Good Manners and Respect for your fellow man’s intelligence” in using raunchy language.

In an interview, Fossati said the Hatchet Job contained “nothing constructive or thought-provoking” and used “gutter language that even Hustler wouldn’t publish.” Fossati said the district should have carried their case to the U.S. Supreme Court and attempted to “make these boys spend the rest of their lives repaying the school board.”

Darwin East, a grove manager who gathered about 500 signatures on petitions supporting school officials, was also offended by the newspaper’s contents and remains angry about the settlement.

“The district got the raw end of the deal,” East said. “Personally, I think what these kids needed from the start was a swat or two . . . You know what the Bible says, ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child.’ ”

But Tiso and Gluesenkamp had loyal supporters, too. In a March 13 letter to the Enterprise, Walter Ross chided the school board for a letter of apology that was “wimpish, vain, self-serving and non-apologetic,” and told the students to be proud for “helping to prove that democracy and the Constitution are, in fact, alive and well.”

The students’ parents, meanwhile, have stood solidly behind their sons throughout the saga--despite what local schoolteacher Katherine Gluesenkamp described as the “discomfort of notoriety in this very old-fashioned, conservative community.”

Although they admit that some of the language in the Hatchet Job may have been inappropriate in the eyes of some readers, the boys’ mothers said they were proud that their sons had the chutzpah to produce and finance a newspaper on their own--and go to court to defend it.

“At first, I was very nervous about the repercussions that might come down upon Philip’s head for asserting himself, and I’ve got to admit it’s been a tense period,” said Tina Tiso. “But I’m really glad he went through with this. It’s been a great learning experience for us.”

Principal Woessner, a man who is clearly proud that his school won one of 16 awards for scholastic excellence from the U.S. Department of Education in 1984, says the time and energy he’s invested in the Hatchet Job ordeal has taught him something, too:

“If ever I’m confronted with a situation like this again, I’ll consult with an attorney or a constitutional law expert before doing anything.”