On March 26, the Aragon Outlook published its annual satire edition, beginning distribution at 8:00 a.m. By 8:30 a.m., administration received concerned reports about its content, and by the end of first period, copies of the paper were confiscated by counselors, campus security and some teachers.
“Halfway into study hall, [counselor Josephine] Ho came in and said there was a typo or a mistake with the newspaper and she collected everyone’s newspapers,” said sophomore Azmir Khan. “I just thought there was probably something controversial in there … I didn’t know by then that it was the satirical one. [But the confiscation] made me want to read it more.”
Based on orders from Superintendent Randall Booker, administration directed safety and security staff over radio to pull all the papers. However, some were unclear whether or not this entailed taking copies directly from students.
“It wasn’t a part of the message, but it was not not a part of the message,” said Safety and Security specialist Marilyn Fowler. “So a couple of us pulled [the papers] straight from students. We didn’t know [we weren’t supposed to] until it was already done. We [also] pulled them from the wastebaskets [and] the paper collection bins.”
During third period, an official announcement was sent out to the staff, alerting them of issues and instructing them to collect any unattended copies. Here, teachers were told they could not actively take them from students.
Administration then worked with the district office to send out a school-wide announcement through ParentSquare at 1:35 p.m. The message notified students, staff and families that articles in the paper included homophobic and anti-immigrant themes and apologized for the resulting harm.
The main articles in contention, as indirectly cited in this email, were “ICE Arrests Loved Felted Friends,” and “Pinkies Up: Too Many Gay People.” The first was a piece about Immigration and Customs Enforcement detaining the Muppets.
“It’s dehumanizing immigrants by not focusing on the real harms of ICE agents but targeting immigrants instead [and] calling [them] muppets and animals,” said junior Elena Alvarado. “It’s making it a joke when it’s not a joke.”
“Too Many Gay People” was a column from two “heterosexual” Outlook editors feeling like the minority in their newsroom, and spurred concerns of homophobia.
“[The headline] ‘Pinkies up: Too Many Gay People’ … makes it seem that being gay is a bad thing,” said senior Lizet Nunez Camacho. “There’s so many people that are gay or are part of the LGBTQ community at our school, and I think seeing that kind of makes them feel like outliers.”
The article also contained a section on heterosexual displays of affection.
“I thought … the girls with their heads in boys’ laps was completely crude and unnecessary,” said math teacher Cheri Dartnell. “I took it home and had my daughter read it — she’s 22 —- because I wanted to see what she thought and she said it was okay until it got down to the head in the lap, then it went off the rails. But I was actually even surprised she was okay with part of it, because I just thought it was … not sensitive to groups of people that we have on campus. It wasn’t funny.”
Others, however, read the piece differently.
“I thought it was really funny,” said senior Midori Saito. “And I’ll speak as someone part of the LGBTQ community — it was not at all offensive to me. Especially reading that it was by Mr. and Mrs. Lavender, that’s a very historically joked on thing, [with] lavender marriages being … false straight marriages. And all the references to pop culture were very queer-coded. I also thought that there’s no way that someone who’s actually homophobic would have been able to write an article like that.”
Although not mentioned directly in the ParentSquare message, people were also troubled with the language used to describe unhoused people in “Newsom’s March: Unhoused to White House” and making the Epstein scandals fodder for joke, as was done in “San Mateo statue Leon the Giraffe found to have ties with convicted sex pest Jeffrey Epstein.”
“Talking about the unhoused, pushing their stuff around in their Safeway shopping cart and using their home as weapons, the tent poles, I thought that was really insensitive,” Dartnell said. “It didn’t land right.”
The Aragon Outlook responded with a statement on April 9, including an apology for the offensive content, an explanation of satire as a concept and three specific articles, as well as criticism of the administrative response. This statement had been drafted and sent to Booker on March 27 at 4 p.m. However, the message experienced delays in publication due to spring break and a crisis at another school in the district the following Monday.
Following the release of the statement, the Outlook received 12 emails from parents, a staff member, and a student sharing their thoughts, in addition to in-person feedback.
“It definitely seems like a very troubling situation to be in: getting censored on something like that is really important to what should be talked about right now,” Saito said. “I thought it was like a breath of fresh air when I saw that [the Outlook] said [they] were actually upset about being censored … I’m one of those people who really support journalism. It’s important to allow students to have this opportunity to voice something and learn about a topic they don’t really know that much about.”
However, the value of including an administrative critique in the message was contested.
“I understand that there were probably a number of things that really bothered the Outlook staff,” said social studies teacher Carlo Corti. “But it’s really hard for me to read an apology that says I’m sorry in one paragraph and then devotes what seemed like most of the rest of the message, to saying … here’s our justifications, and by the way, the admin really did bad things too … Adding the rest of it made the apology feel a little disingenuous.”
Previously, most satire pieces had not been vetted by individuals outside the publication office, or even scrutinized by the Outlook’s own editors. The Outlook plans to continue moving forward with satire editions in the future, but hopes to bring greater sensitivity into the process, from the pitch to the execution of the article itself.
Read our Parentsquare message at: https://bit.ly/OutlookSatire
Read our editorial statement at: https://bit.ly/editorialstatement
