Dissident Senior May Not Graduate

The battle over whether Joe Neal graduates tonight may not be over yet.

School officials signaled Wednesday that they will resume their bid to discipline the Bassett High School senior for distributing fliers portraying the principal as a dictator.

Lawyers for the Bassett Unified School District will seek a hearing today asking a federal judge to reconsider the order that overturned Neal’s suspension and cleared him to graduate, according to a declaration signed by the district’s lawyer and delivered to Neal’s attorney.

At stake is whether Neal, 17, marches with his classmates or faces possible expulsion.

U.S. District Judge James M. Ideman on Tuesday issued a temporary order allowing Neal to go back to the La Puente school, citing free-speech concerns and labeling the suspension “draconian.” Neal was suspended June 5.

The judge set a hearing next week to determine whether the school could go ahead with a planned expulsion hearing, though Neal would have graduated by then.

But in court papers delivered to Neal’s lawyers Wednesday, the district’s attorneys argued that the matter will be moot after graduation. It could not be determined whether the documents had been filed with the court by day’s end.

The documents indicated the district will seek a court hearing by this afternoon. If that effort succeeds, the school could have time to take disciplinary action before the 7 p.m. graduation.

District officials did not return calls seeking comment.

The controversy has roiled the 1,000-student campus since Neal wrote and distributed fliers in April that painted Principal Linda Bouman as a “quasi-fascist” despot who made curriculum changes without consulting teachers and infringed on student expression. Neal also criticized what he called cutbacks in the French program.

The one-page leaflet invoked a list of tyrants from Hitler to former President Augusto Pinochet of Chile and called Bouman fuehrer, exhorting students with the anti-AIDS slogan “Silence=Death.”

School officials said the leaflets were threatening to Bouman and violated rules on the publication of materials on campus. Bouman has declined comment.