CORONADO, Calif. — Update: September, 15, 2022 - Coronado Unified School District sent CBS 8 the following statement regarding the lawsuit: Coronado Unified School District (CUSD) followed the mask order issued by the Department of Health and directed to San Diego County schools. No student was bullied. Any student refusing to comply with the mask order was given alternate choices of learning. CUSD is committed to protecting the health and safety of everyone. The lawsuit is frivolous.
A junior at Coronado High School says teachers and administrators bullied and harassed her for six weeks as she protested the district's mask mandate, eventually forcing her to transfer high schools.
In a new lawsuit, the girl and her mother, Nicole Ward, say Coronado Unified and high school administrators and teachers refused to find a solution to the girl's objections to wearing a mask during school earlier this year.
Instead, they say administrators and teachers forced her to sit outside by herself in the cold while marking her absent. After several weeks of her protesting, staff suspended her and called the police on her to prevent her from entering the campus.
"It's not really a question of if she was bullied, it's how she was bullied and the extent that they bullied her," said Ward in an interview with CBS 8. "We had teachers blocking doorways keeping her from getting in the classroom. They threatened to call the police if she tried to pass them."
The Protest and The School's Response
According to the lawsuit, Ward's daughter, identified in the lawsuit as G.W, showed up at Coronado High School on January 31 of this year, "intending to peacefully protest [Coronado Unified's] mask mandate."
"The whole protest was entirely my daughter's decision," Ward told CBS 8. "I'm not anti-mask. We live in a country that offers us a lot of opportunities and we can choose what is best for our personal well-being. In my daughter's case, the program she was in at Coronado High School, required her to go to school for an extra two hours a day. During that time, she was singing and dancing with a mask on. It had significant impacts on her health and we had been requesting from the school board to have that mask mandate removed for about nine months prior to her protest.
G.W.'s protest, however, was met with a stiff response from school staff.
The lawsuit says the school called Ward and told her to pick her daughter up from school.
When Ward refused, staff forced G.W. to sit outside in the quad for the remainder of the day where temperatures, according to the legal complaint, reached 61 degrees.
Much of the same occurred in the following days and the girl was forced to sit outside all day, this as temperatures dropped during a winter storm.
To keep warm the high-schooler wore "a battery-powered heated jacket to stay warm."
Added the lawsuit, "She felt alienated, humiliated, and belittled. She further felt that the mask mandate was being enforced against her in a harassing and putative manner."
Ward says the mistreatment continued. During a lockdown drill, students were placed in locked rooms while G.W. was placed in a bathroom with no lock on it.
Into the second week of her protest, the lawsuit states that administrators tried to prevent G.W. from stepping onto school grounds. That same week, teachers began to mark her absent despite the fact she was outside in the quad.
On her 18th day of protesting the mask mandate, G.W. entered her classroom and sat down. When she declined to don a mask, the teacher decided to move the entire class to another room. G.W. followed, "determined to attain an in-person education," says the lawsuit.
A teacher then told the girl that the school was suspending her for breaking school policy.
According to the lawsuit, on the 24th day of her protest, school administrators suspended G.W. again. And when she attempted to enter the school the following day she was met by police.
"G. W. left school—sobbing—having decided that she wanted to stay home instead of facing continued humiliation and undue pressure from CUSD staff and, now, the police," says the lawsuit.
Throughout the course of the next five weeks, teachers continued to mark G.W. as absent, despite the fact that she was on campus, and forced to attend class virtually.
On the 64th day of her protest, G.W. ended her protest and made the decision to transfer schools.
The girl's mother says the protest and the response from the district took a toll on her daughter and her family but she is proud that her daughter stood up for what she thought was right.
"It was all just so intense," said Ward. "She had to be tutored after missing so much school. She had to start her senior year at a new school, forced to make brand new friends. All that mixed in with the harassment and bullying that she received at Coronado."
Added Ward, "As far as me being proud, I think that is an understatement. I don't know of any other child that would stand up to bullying adults day after day, on their own. I mean, at any point, she had said to me, like, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to go there. This is too much, we would have found another solution. That was never the case."
CBS 8 reached out to Coronado Unified School District for comment. A spokesperson said the district cannot comment on pending litigation.
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