Hold OCSA Admin Accountable for Silencing Students and Promoting Anti-Palestinianism on Campus

As concerned community members and supporters of equality and justice in Palestine, we are deeply disturbed by the complete cancellation of the Building Bridges Club meeting on Occupied Palestine and call upon the administration of the Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA) to respect its First Amendment obligations and allow the meeting to take place without interference.

As a public charter school, OCSA is bound to respect students’ First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution, and its blatant violation of those Constitutional rights sets a worrying precedent. By shutting down inconvenient events that do not fit the administration’s political biases, the administration violates their own principles of fostering “student growth and education.”

The administration’s political bias against Palestinians and toward the Israeli narrative is patent in its actions and creates a double standard. OCSA has a school-approved Israel club— a club that has been allowed to present not once, but twice, about the “Israel-Palestine Conflict” without any sort of censorship or screening from Administration in the past two school years. In comparison, when a club flyer advertising a meeting discussing the history of Palestine centering the perspectives of Palestinian people was posted on Instagram, not only was it forcibly taken down in under 24 hours, but the club meeting itself was shut down almost immediately.

Thus, we call upon the OCSA administration immediately to:
1) publicly rescind their statement that the Building Bridges meeting on Occupied Palestine was against its core values, and to acknowledge the harm that this censorship has brought upon the Palestinian students of OCSA.

2) ensure that the free speech rights of Palestinians and their supporters are afforded equal protection at OCSA.

3) let the Building Bridges Club present about this topic in the future without censorship, in the same way that the Israel Club was not censored when they presented about this topic two times within the last two school years.