A Santa Clara County jury awarded $1 million and tuition reimbursement to the families of two teenage boys whose Mountain View private school expelled them after a photo surfaced of them in a green acne medication face mask — which was described by some as racially insensitive blackface.
The teens and their parents sued Saint Francis High School, a private Catholic high school in Mountain View, stating that administrators forced them to leave the school without a proper investigation after the photo of three boys wearing a dark green facial mask surfaced.
The jury, which handed down its decision Monday, sided with the boys that the school’s expulsion lacked due process. The jury also agreed that the school breached an oral contract after promising that they would not share the reason for the school transfer with other schools, then reversing their decision, said Krista Baughman, partner at Dhillon Law Group, which represented the plaintiffs in the case.
“Since the day this happened, the clients were cast with this accusation that wasn’t true,” Baughman said. “They’re young men. They’ve got their whole lives ahead of them. The primary goal of this case was to clear their good names.”
The boys, who were identified by their initials in the case and were minors at the time it was filed, lost on three other claims of violation of free speech, defamation and breach of contract.
Saint Francis High School disagreed with the jury’s decision about the fairness of the school’s disciplinary process, a school spokesperson said in a statement. The school is considering its future legal options, including appealing the case, the spokesperson said.
“We appreciate the jury’s verdict rejecting the plaintiffs’ two primary claims of defamation and breach of contract and thank them for their thoughtful analysis,” the Saint Francis High School spokesperson said. “The jury rightly found we did not breach our handbook, did not violate the students’ free speech rights and did not defame the students.”
In early June 2020, Saint Francis officials learned of the photograph of the boys wearing the face mask after another student sent it in a group chat, according to the complaint. The school called the parents of each boy on June 4; the parents explained the photo was not of blackface but rather of the boys wearing acne face masks three years earlier.
A day later, the school told the boys that they would not be welcome to return to the school. The complaint stated that the school’s principal told one of the boy’s parents that “this isn’t about intent, it’s about optics.”
The school gave the boys the option to leave voluntarily or face expulsion. The principal said that she would not share the reason for the transfer if the boys left, Baughman said. One of the boys planned to continue playing football with the goal of playing in college, but the principal reneged on her prior promise, according to the family lawyer, and said she would have to disclose that he was transferring due to a disciplinary situation when given a specific form required for high school athletes transferring between California schools.
That essentially blacklisted the plaintiff from playing sports in California, Baughman said. To continue his playing career, he moved to Utah, forcing the family to live separately for his final year of high school.
In its decision, the jury agreed with the boys’ contention that the school did not conduct a thorough investigation into the photo before expulsion, violating their right to due process. The decision extends a previous California Supreme Court decision that recognized the right to due process for college students at private universities in the state.
The jury “gave the boys the fair hearing they never got from Saint Francis,” Baughman said.
The jury’s decision, once finalized, will require that all high schools across the state uphold students’ right to due process. Schools will be able to create their own rules, Baughman said, but this decision ensures that students will “have some form of ability to present their evidence and have it heard in a fair manner.”
The jury also awarded one defendant his expenses related to relocating to Utah to continue playing sports, Baughman added.
“We want to sincerely thank the jury and the court system for helping our boys and our families find justice, which now paves the way for their names to be cleared for things they never did,” the Hughes family, the family of one of the two boys, said in a statement. “St. Francis can never again assume a child is guilty without giving a child the opportunity to show their innocence.”
