A Missed Lesson in Limits of Vile Speech

It wasn’t what Janis Adams had in mind when she taught students in her media classes at Palisades High about the power of the press.

She didn’t realize an underground student newspaper would be her undoing; that she would be drummed out of a career she loved by harassment posing as free speech; that both students and grown-ups would bungle basic concepts like authority and responsibility.

In fact, Adams didn’t even see the paper--its title a slang reference to an act of oral sex--when it first began circulating on the Pacific Palisades campus two years ago. The rogue newspaper used the most vulgar and insulting terms imaginable, its articles advised how to humiliate girls during oral sex, how to make a teacher cry, how to slap a girl into submission, how to finagle sex with a teacher’s wife.

Because two of the paper’s creators were students Adams had bounced from her class for being disruptive, they were out to even the score.

I cannot, in a family newspaper, do justice to the vile insults directed at the teacher. One front-page photo superimposed Adams’ face on the body of a nude woman graphically engaged in a sexual act. One article said that Adams, a former actress, had “probably” starred in porn flicks and had performed a certain sexual act so often that she now has to wear diapers at work. Adams was not the only teacher vilified, but she became a central target, and the attacks became more vulgar the more she fought to stop them.

“I wanted the boys expelled,” she said. “I’d refer them [for discipline], call their parents ... but nothing would be done. And they just got more and more brazen.”

One administrator told her “boys will be boys”; another characterized their antics as “senior pranks,” she said. When one mother was called in for a meeting, she denounced Adams for hurting her son’s chances to get into the college of his choice.

By the end of the school year in June 2000, Adams was afraid to leave her classroom. A trip across the quad forced her through a gantlet of students yelling curses and making sexual remarks. There were phone calls at home, a death threat taped to her classroom door. She was convinced she was being stalked, and she got a restraining order against the boys.

Still, she planned to return to the school that September, “until I tried to prepare my lesson plans, and I just fell apart,” she said. She sued the Los Angeles Unified School District, charging that officials allowed Palisades High to become a hostile workplace by failing to protect her from sexual harassment.

Ten days ago a jury agreed and awarded her $4.35 million for lost wages and emotional damage. “It’s the first time in the nation,” said her lawyer, Gloria Allred, “that a teacher has won a case against a school district because of sexual harassment by students.”

District officials are still scratching their heads over what went wrong. “I have no question that Janis Adams was hurt emotionally by being pilloried in this way,” said Los Angeles Unified attorney Hal Kwalwasser. “But does the district deserve financial liability?”

The students printed their newspaper off campus and carried it in hidden in their backpacks. When Adams complained that spring, the school banned the paper, suspended six students and transferred five others.

But new editions kept showing up on campus. Then the transferred students were allowed to return within months, after their parents hired lawyers and the ACLU took up their cause.

“We did everything we could to keep these kids from harassing this teacher,” Kwalwasser said. “No one has told us yet what reasonable steps we failed to take.”

Even teachers are divided. “Anybody who expects to work in a public high school and not face hostility, insults and bias is out of their mind,” said one teacher, whose campus, like Palisades, is considered one of the district’s best. “These are ugly little teenagers, and they’ve grown up in a world where anything goes.”

For their part, the students involved seem to have a hard time understanding what all the fuss is about. “Maybe it’s the generation gap that makes it look worse to adults than to us,” said one boy.

Another complained about being transferred, arguing that he should have just been made to apologize or “do community service, like helping the teachers that were insulted.

“I realize that the newspaper had some very malicious and cruel things in it, which I thought would be funny and just a joke,” he wrote in an opinion piece published, along with other points of view, in The Times when the controversy first emerged.

After all, haven’t teenagers always felt the urge to push the limits, to break rules just to show they can? Maybe these obscene rantings reflect little more than a bunch of immature kids getting their thrills by putting grown-ups on edge. “Spoiled rich kids,” their teachers call them, trying to show that they’re renegades.

Adams still gets teary-eyed when she talks about how “hurt and humiliated” she felt as she read of her fictional sexual exploits. But what also hurt, she said, was watching the procession of girls who showed up in her classes, sporting buttons pinned to their shirts supporting the newspaper.

“I tried to talk to them about the newspaper, how hurtful it was, how they could support something so hateful and insulting and demeaning.... They just didn’t get it,” Adams said.

Maybe that’s what is most tragic about this story... not that it ended Adams’ seven-year career or that the $4.35 million it will cost the district is enough to buy the land for a new elementary school, but that no one seems to have seized the chance to make this the teaching moment it could have been.

A firm, unbending stand by school officials against the offenders would have taught students about limits and boundaries. And a hard look at the publication might have provoked discussions among students and teachers, and in families, about the nature of sexual harassment, the consequences of cruelty, and the responsibilities of free speech.

“I don’t think anybody learned anything,” Adams said last week. “Somebody has to be in charge, to say, ‘This is not acceptable.’ Otherwise, kids just push and push to see how far they can go. What’s the lesson in this? That nobody wants to take responsibility?”

I think she’s right, and I hope her former students listen: Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing, part of what makes our country great. But take another look, kids, at the message you’re sending, because freedom’s not worth much if that’s all you’ve got to say.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.