“Have you ever wanted to just sock it to your principal? I mean say everything that you thought was wrong or made you angry?
Joe Neal did and he survived. When he was a senior, he wrote a letter criticizing his principal and subsequently was suspended. With the help of an attorney, the school’s decision was overturned and Joe graduated with his class. Because of this experience, the 18-year-old will run for a position on the Bassett school board in La Puente east of Pasadena.
When Joe was a senior at Bassett High School, he didn’t like the way school administration was handling the curriculum. Teachers had to create a new curriculum in less than two months.
Elizabeth Hernandez, yearbook editor, remembers giving a hug to her math teacher, who was crying from the stress. “It was very emotional for me, I mean these are people who you look up to.”
In addition, ninth graders were to be isolated from the rest of the school and students would be assigned one of five different lunch periods. Spanish was becoming mandatory and the French program was shrinking.
Principal Linda Bouman started strictly overseeing the newspaper’s Editorial and Opinion section following an editorial by Joe in which he criticized the school for cutting down the trees in front of the campus. (Several calls to Principal Bouman were unreturned.)
Jessica Juarez, former newspaper editor and Bassett graduate, said she couldn’t report the news students wanted to hear. “I didn’t even consider myself as the editor of the newspaper anymore,” said Jessica.
Joe compared his principal to Hitler
Angered by the administration’s decisions and the lack of teacher involvement in these decisions, Joe wrote a letter in which he compared Principal Bouman to dictators like Hitler. He photocopied the letter and handed it out to friends.
“It was such an environment of intimidation,” said Joe. “My sole intention was to give it to my classmates. It was more for empowerment, that we can do this.”
After Joe distributed the letter, school police interrogated him. They wanted to know if he had any outside help from teachers. Then they looked at some of his English papers and realized that the letter matched Joe’s writing style.
On their third questioning session, investigators read him his Miranda rights: ” you have the right to remain silent, anything you do or say can and will be used against you in the court of law…”
“At that point, I wished I hadn’t done it,” said Joe. He worried they might send him to jail.
Four days before final exams and almost two months after writing the letter, the school district suspended him, according to court documents, for his letter which “constituted a threat of violence and had created a disturbance at the school.”
Students had mixed reactions. Many were supportive, like Joe’s friends who rallied in the district office and those who voted for Joe to sing the national anthem during graduation ceremonies. Others thought he acted foolishly.
“It was really split. Half said I was stupid to do what I did,” said Joe.
As for his family, only Tisha Neal, his sister, really understood Joe’s cause. She herself had participated in protests, but his stepfather could not relate.
“My step-dad didn’t understand. He thought I was kind of stupid for what I did. To him I stuck my neck out for my teachers.”
Even his teachers had mixed feelings.
“The teachers were frustrated. They were grateful but at the same time they saw I was getting myself into trouble,” said Joe.
The day after his suspension, the teachers rallied for Joe by wearing all red to school. His friends would report back to him, relaying the theme color of the day. Some days it was all red, other days it was all blue, but it always centered around the colors of the American flag.
One of his fondest memories was walking into a room full of teachers bedecked in red. Someone had recorded a newscast about the suspension and they all cheered as they watched the tape.
Then a friend helped Joe take his story to the San Gabriel Tribune. The Tribune then contacted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which supplied an attorney to represent his case. Other newspaper and TV stations began to follow the story.
The widespread media coverage stimulated community involvement. Parents started calling him and asked if he could write his letter in Spanish, and some even went to the school board.
Joe said he was surprised to find so many parents getting involved. As a Puerto Rican living in a predominantly Latino community, Joe said he has noticed that immigrant parents rarely participate. He said many people in the community believe they are on someone else’s soil so they shouldn’t question anything.
“As a community, a lot of people don’t talk about what’s going on. They just trust. They have this amazing trust in the administration, in the city government , and they don’t feel that they should question,” said Joe.
Less than six hours before his graduation, Joe’s lawyers filed an appeal to get him back in school to attend the ceremony.
“At this point, it looked like a personal vengeance on me,” said Joe.
Finally, the judge ordered a restraining order against the school allowing him to go to the graduation.
A massive sea of news cameras greeted Joe and his fellow peers before the ceremonies. Teachers wore blue gowns with American flags on their lapels in support of Joe, and the student body president acknowledged his courage in front the whole administration. (Someone else sang the national anthem, though.)
At the end of the year, 10 to 12 teachers left the district altogether, said Joe. Janet Colston-Day, the journalism and yearbook teacher, was relocated to Torch Middle School and the main custodian was fired for letting a Channel 7 crew on campus, Joe said.
Joe’s victory gave teachers and students alike the confidence to speak out and take action. Teachers started having meetings off campus without key administration.
Although Joe admits he might have worded the letter differently, if given another chance, he wouldn’t have avoided the situation.
“I really firmly believe that everything we do in life takes us to the next step. If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be here right now and I wouldn’t have realized how many people really cared,” he said.
He advises students who wish to confront their administration to have support, to get their story straight, and to voice it in every way possible.
If he could do it again, Joe said he would have told more people sooner, because his lawyers had very little time to put his case together. His lawyers pushed for him to attend his graduation and the judge gave them permission only five hours before the ceremonies were to begin.
The experience advocating student’s rights has led him to seek further change. Joe is campaigning to be elected to the Bassett school board on Nov. 4.
The Bassett graduate is hoping to make more classes available to more students. Bassett High’s field trip policy is another aspect he would like to reform. After a student got ill on the French Club’s trip to Paris, trips outside the state were virtually impossible. Last year’s Spanish class planned to fly to Spain during Easter Break, but the trip was canceled.
In addition, he would like to get parents and students interested in and attending school board meetings, perhaps even teach students how to write a petition.
“Parents and teachers are concerned on a different level, but students are really the foundation,” said Joe. “I want to make students realize that someone does care about them and someone is looking out for them.””