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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. Being in education is a tough job right now. Decreasing budgets, a federal government that's seemingly de-emphasizing the Department of Education, and increasing pressure from social media, both for students and for teachers, all add up to systemic challenges. But locally, one public high school seems to be rising above these challenges to provide quality education and a vital sense of community. Today on the show, you'll hear from the principal of South Eugene High School and hear what's working for this institution, ranked among the best in Oregon. Then in the second part of the show, I'll talk with a colleague at OPB about a story from another school in southwest Washington, where a post from a student on social media has led to a teacher suspension and the entire faculty looking over their shoulders. Kee Zublin, the principal of South Eugene High School, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for coming in.
Kee Zublin: Great to be here, Michael, thank you.
Dunne: In your estimation, what makes a great high school?
Zublin: Well, that's a big question.
Dunne: It is.
Zublin: You know, I think a great high school, first and foremost, we have to remember that we are a public school, and we are serving every student in our catchment area to the best of our ability. And so, the greatest schools are the schools that can figure out how to meet every single student where they are and accelerate their learning to the greatest extent possible.
Dunne: Why don't you talk about how high school doesn't simply stand alone. Talk about the partnership between administration, teachers, students, parents, and the community in general.
Zublin: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, first of all, I think it's important to keep in mind that South Eugene High School is the oldest school in this district. It's now in the oldest building, but it's also the oldest high school, going back into the 19th century. That was Eugene High School, and then it became South Eugene High School. There's literally a room in the school where I can find yearbooks going all the way back to then. There's a legacy there, and a lot of people in this community are deeply invested in South Eugene High School. A lot of people have gone to that school, including myself, and proud alumni come back. We have some events that celebrate our distinguished alumni, including one called Celebrate South, where we induct various graduates into our Hall of Fame. So getting back to your question, it's a deep level of community involvement and interest in that school. We have wonderful staff who deeply care about the learning of all students. It's a great place.
Dunne: South is ranked well in the state, and U.S. News and World Report puts it as, I think, the 16th best high school in the state and one of the only ones outside of the Portland metro area. Why do you think that is? Why do you think South rises above?
Zublin: Well, it has for a long time. There's a legacy there. If you look at the way those rankings are calculated, they consider six factors. They look at Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate participation, for example, as one of the factors. We serve an area that is a pretty academic part of town. A lot of children of professors go to South Eugene High School. There's a lot of students taking AP classes, and a lot of students taking International Baccalaureate classes through the IHS program.
Dunne: International High School.
Zublin: That's right. And then, of course, they look at graduation rates, which ours tend to be the highest in the district, and we're proud of that. Another important factor, in my opinion, is how well our underserved students perform. That's about 10 percent of how the rankings are calculated, and it makes me happy that that's a place where we shine as well, taking care of the most marginalized among us.
Dunne: How do resources factor into that? Whether it's taxes or just parent support, talk about that and how important it is for kids.
Zublin: Well, as your listeners know, we're heading into a time of resource reduction in 4J, and there are a lot of reasons why this is happening. What it means is that the breadth of what we can offer is something we really have to fight to protect, because how comprehensive your curriculum is distinguishes a school. And that doesn't just mean high-level AP and IB classes. That also means career and technical education classes, hands-on things, the arts, performing arts. All of those are important for a subset of students to experience belonging and thrive.
Dunne: We have talked to many educators about what some people call the enrollment cliff, and the fact that we just don't have as many kids as before. Talk about navigating through that pretty big challenge.
Zublin: It is a big challenge. Historically, if you looked at the 4J school district's enrollment numbers, it wasn't that many years ago that enrollment was above 20,000, then it was 15,000, and now there's a real potential it's going to be about 1,000 less in the coming year. That's a significant dip. It's due to drops in birth rates, which is a nationwide trend. It also has to do with the cost of living in this town and how many young families can afford to live here. So that's a period of contraction the district is going to have to adapt to, and right-sizing the staffing is painful. That's what's happening right now, and my primary interest throughout all of that is in having a comprehensive high school that can offer as much meaningful programming as possible.
Dunne: You talked about the fact that a lot of professors' kids go to your school. But talk about whether having the state's flagship university just blocks away is a benefit.
Zublin: There's no doubt it's a benefit. We have a great relationship with the university, and we send about 75 students a year to the University of Oregon alone. That's extremely meaningful for us. It's also important that your listeners understand that South Eugene serves a diverse catchment area. It also includes students from Glenwood who are walking through our halls and have a different set of needs than some of the other kids there.
Dunne: I always think back to when I was in high school, and I imagine you do as well. I think it's probably very instructive. Do the challenges that 15-, 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds face today, are they uniquely difficult compared to what you and I faced decades ago?
Zublin: There's no question, on so many fronts. The first and most obvious is that in 2020, schools broke the social contract with our students during COVID. That was something none of us would have ever anticipated, that we would shut down schools for such a long period of time and then restore them in a really different form. We're still seeing the fallout from that. Across the nation, rates of regular, on-time attendance have still not gotten back to pre-COVID levels. We're also seeing the norm that we provide devices for every student, and that a good chunk of their learning is done online, which is becoming increasingly more controversial because we're recognizing that the amount of device use is not really good for kids' mental health. And of course, the use of smartphones is a huge shift. If you were to come into the halls of South Eugene High School and compare it to when you were a kid, it's really different. That's part of what led to Gov. Kotek's executive order trying to get phones out of the schools. Part of what she was trying to do is reteach prosocial behavior to kids who are otherwise on their phones walking down the halls. You wouldn't think a cell phone would matter as much in that context as it matters in the classroom, but it does. There's a lot of learning going on between two kids walking down the halls, and if you can get their noses out of phones, it's hugely beneficial.
Dunne: You brought up COVID. Were there some benefits? Because you and others in education had to turn on a dime. Was there something somewhat positive from that?
Zublin: Boy, did we turn on a dime. Think of a school district as a giant steamship running in a direction with an enormous amount of inertia, and the captain's hands resting lightly on the wheel. Well, the rudder fell off and the engine gave out, and we had to immediately rethink what we were doing. We knew it was going to be painful for kids, and I remember thinking at the time, I hope something good comes out of all of this. And I think there has been some good. We have more resilient kids who have faced more challenges than you and I probably faced at that age, and resiliency is a good thing to have. There were also opportunities to engage in professional development with one another, which I think many school districts took advantage of. So it was a mixed bag.
Dunne: What's it like being the principal today, when you have a federal government that, at least in some rhetoric, seems to want to dismantle the Department of Education and public schools as we've known them? What's it like navigating that challenge?
Zublin: A lot of that is just background noise for the work. If you look at it at the boots-on-the-ground level, people appreciate their schools. People appreciate their school administrators and their teachers, and they are entrusting their children to us, and that continues to be a priority for our families. Apart from the concerns around funding at the federal level, which, by the way, hasn't stopped yet, I'm not in the business of making predictions, but I'll just leave it there. We're still getting the funding that we expected.
Dunne: He's Kee Zublin, the principal of South Eugene High School. Really appreciate you coming in and talking to us.
Zublin: Great talking to you.
Dunne: Let's now talk to my colleague at OPB about a concerning story in southwest Washington that might be a simple case of he said, she said, with major consequences. Erik Neumann is the southwest Washington bureau chief for OPB. Erik, thanks so much for coming on and talking to us.
Erik Neumann: Sounds great.
Dunne: I read your recent piece, and even though it's in southwest Washington, I thought it would resonate with a lot of people. It was titled "After the Dismissal of a Battleground High School Teacher, Other Educators Censor Their Curricula." Just give us a general overview of your story and what you found.
Neumann: So it's a story about accusations that were made against a high school teacher in Battleground, Wash., which is about 30 minutes north of Portland, and how teachers are having to navigate this world of politics and social media today. It's about a social studies teacher named Amanda Gonzales. The day that conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed in September 2025, she had an incident with a student. A student in the hallway came up to her and asked if she knew about Kirk's death. She has said to me, and it's documented in investigations, that she said Kirk was not her political cup of tea, and she offered thoughts and prayers for his family. The student said something different. In texts he sent to his mom, the student said his teacher had said she had no sympathy for Nazis. So two very different descriptions of the exchange. That text message was then shared online, where it went viral. There were all these emails sent to the district about how the teacher should be fired. Later that day, Gonzales was put on leave, and she's actually been on leave since then, about eight months. The other impact of this is that other teachers in the district are censoring themselves because they're not sure the district will support them if something similar happened to them.
Dunne: You did a pretty thorough deep dive and talked to Gonzales. Tell us what she told you in general, and what kind of impact this has had on her.
Neumann: She said it had a pretty dramatic impact on her life, mostly because she lost her job, or was put on leave, I should say, and because the text went viral on social media. She was physically threatened online by a parent, against whom she had to get a restraining order. Her parents' house was doxxed. The address was shared online, so they ended up having to get video cameras at their house. She described a lot of anxiety about leaving the house. She said it had burned her life to the ground, and since then she's been focused on trying to get her job back.
Dunne: You reached out to the decision makers. Were you able to get a response from the school board or the administration? And it seems like they put her on leave really quickly.
Neumann: They did. They conducted an investigation and ultimately called for her termination later that month. So that took a little bit of time, but she was put on leave the same day as the incident. The district said they basically believed the students. They did their own investigation that led to that request for her to be terminated. I think they interviewed maybe a half-dozen students and said they found them credible. They said that Gonzales had a history of sharing personal views on politics in school, and they said the basis for wanting to remove her was that she had broken several school policies about staff expression at school. That was the justification they were using.
Dunne: It was known that this teacher would share political beliefs, but had she ever been in trouble before? What did her teaching record suggest?
Neumann: From the documents and investigations I read, there weren't any major problems. In fact, it was the opposite. She'd been at this district for about 10 or 11 years, and if I remember right, eight of those years she had the highest possible marks as a teacher. She taught AP courses. Just from interviewing her as a person, it was clear that she's really passionate about her career.
Dunne: You mentioned a third-party arbitrator. Take us through the next chapter. She's been suspended for almost a year. What did the arbitrator decide?
Neumann: The arbitrator did their own investigation. This arbitrator is a retired judge in Washington state. The arbitrator determined that the accusations against Gonzales were not credible, and that the district had not met its burden of proof regarding the various policies it said she had broken.
Dunne: Does that mean she gets reinstated? Where does it go from there?
Neumann: That's really the impasse. She appealed what the district said. Because she appealed, she wound up in this limbo period where there were buyout offers going back and forth, but she really just wanted her job back, and that's why it took eight months. The next step, ultimately, would have been for her to take the case to court to try to force the district to give her job back.
Dunne: The other part of your story was the fact that this isn't just impacting her. Other teachers at that high school, and probably throughout the district and maybe even down here in Oregon, are looking at this and wondering about self-censorship. Talk about that aspect.
Neumann: That was the thing I found maybe even more interesting. There were other teachers in the district who basically said a judge had determined Gonzales was in the right, and yet the district wasn't letting her go back to her job. So they were being really cautious about the types of things they were doing in class. In one case, I talked to an English teacher who was in the middle of teaching "The Crucible," a book about the Salem Witch Trials used as a metaphor for the Red Scare and McCarthyism. She was in the middle of teaching this book when an administrator pulled her aside and said they had heard students talking about whether they could get her to say something to get her fired. So the teacher had to go back into teaching this book about false accusations from young people against adults, and sort of live the experience she was teaching. She talked about pulling back from some of the lessons she would have taught, and also some poems from well-known poets that she chose not to teach. I also talked to a math teacher who previously would have engaged with students more because students ask all sorts of questions, but he said he was strictly sticking to math because that felt like the safest thing to do. It's a kind of self-censoring chill happening within the high school.
Dunne: From the teachers you talked to, does it seem like they're concerned that students are trying to act as, I'm not sure what the right term is, vigilantes to go after teachers they simply don't like?
Neumann: That was the concern from the teachers I talked to. I did reach out to others within the union in Washington state, and their perspective was basically that high school students don't really understand the consequences of these kinds of accusations, especially when you include social media, which can inflame situations so much more. They were basically saying this is a good reason to put a cell phone ban in place in Washington state, which doesn't currently have one, because it could prevent these kinds of incidents from happening.
Dunne: Fascinating. Erik Neumann is the southwest Washington bureau chief for OPB. Erik, really appreciate you coming on and talking about this story.
Neumann: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show, we'll bring you the story of Oregon's shocking lack of attorneys to handle cases and the damaging consequences people are seeing all over the state. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
