Updated Nov. 28 and Dec. 27
The emotional wounds are still fresh for 13-year-old Ella, even though it’s been a year since she fled her San Jose public charter school to escape relentless antisemitic bullying and harassment.
“It’s been a long year,” Ella’s mom, Elisa Schweizer, told J. on Nov. 21, choking back tears. She was seated next to her daughter on the couch in their home. The family asked that Ella’s last name not be used for this article to safeguard her identity.
Last month, Ella and her parents filed a lawsuit against University Preparatory Academy (UPA), which she attended for one semester of seventh grade during the 2023-2024 school year. The lawsuit also names the Santa Clara County Board of Education, the Santa Clara County Office of Education and the California Department of Education, institutions they say failed to protect Ella.
After the onset of the Israel-Hamas war and the spike in global antisemitism, Ella endured months of harassment and bullying by peers, some of whom referred to her as “white Ella” or simply “Jew” and accused her Israeli family of being terrorists and occupiers of “stolen land,” according to the family’s lawsuit.
School administrators did nothing to stop the abuse or ameliorate the harm, the lawsuit claims.
“Initially, I just wanted to shake them and say, ‘Why aren’t you understanding? She’s a 12-year-old girl that’s been maliciously bullied, and for being a Jew,’” Schweizer told J. about UPA leadership. “I think it just took a while for me to realize that it was a systemic failure and that there was no one on their team that was going to protect my child, and I needed to step in and protect her.”
Ella transferred out during winter break, returning to the Jewish school where she’d spent grades K-6 and where many of her friends still attended. But the emotional scars of the UPA experience have lingered for almost a year, her mother said.
“She completely withdrew,” Schweizer said. “The whole year, she was just shut in her room. She wouldn’t go to dance class. She wouldn’t do anything.”
Competitive dancing has long been Ella’s favorite extracurricular activity. But she decided to take time away from competition to “relieve some of the pressure” she’d been under. She still hasn’t gone back.
Ella said she closed herself off from her parents and siblings after she withdrew from UPA because “at that point, I just didn’t know who to trust.” Too many adults had failed to help her, Schweizer said.
“In the last two weeks she’s started to come out of this fog,” Schweizer said. “I felt like I lost my daughter for a year.”
The school district did not immediately respond to J.’s request for comment. UPA executive director David Porter previously told J. that the school undertook a “full investigation” and disciplinary process but did not specify what action was taken.
‘We want you to die’
Prior to coming to UPA, Ella had spent all of her school years at a private K-8 Jewish day school in the South Bay. There, Ella found kinship with other Israeli American students who, like her, spoke Hebrew at home.
Thinking ahead to high school, Ella’s parents began looking into UPA, a grade 7-12 charter school that came highly recommended by a Jewish family they knew.
“Everything online checked out. They were sending kids to great universities. There were many things that appealed to us,” Schweizer said.
After visiting the school for an open house and liking the academic offerings, as well as the smaller class sizes that felt familiar to her, Ella agreed. About 700 students attend UPA.
“It felt like I could see myself there,” she told J.
But directly following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, Ella’s entire world was turned upside down — particularly at school.
It took a while to realize that it was a systemic failure and that there was no one on their team that was going to protect my child, and I needed to step in and protect her.
In the first days back after Oct. 7, according to the lawsuit, two classmates confronted Ella, telling her that “Jews are terrorists” and asking her, “Do you know that your family in Israel is living on stolen land?”
Classmates in the ethnically diverse school — 6.6% of students identify as white — also began calling her “white Ella,” according to the family’s lawsuit.
On Oct. 16, 2023, a week after the Hamas massacre, two boys overheard Ella speaking Hebrew on her phone after school and waiting to be picked up. They chased her, yelling “we want you [to] die” and mocking her Hebrew, according to the lawsuit.
The bullying and harassment continued, Ella said, and all of her friends except for one stopped sitting with her at lunch. In November, a girl in her math class began referring to Ella simply as “Jew.”
“Through those months, I just tried to keep my head down and not be drawn [in] or respond to any of it,” Ella told J. “I would say to myself, OK, one more week, one more week, one more week. And that’s how the time passed.”
‘The final straw’
Meanwhile, Schweizer and her husband were requesting to meet with any number of school officials, pleading for them to help their daughter.
In late October 2023, Schweizer and Ella sat down with Porter, the school’s top administrator. Ella gave a detailed description of what she had been experiencing. One of the students who harassed Ella was disciplined, Schweizer said. Another began calling Ella a “snitch” and vowed to “beat the shit” out of her, according to the lawsuit.
“She cried many mornings, did not want to go to school,” Schweizer said. “She was afraid.”
After dropping Ella off at school, her father “would often park on the corner and just cry,” Schweizer said.
Ella said she could see how upsetting the situation was for her parents, too. “I was blaming myself for what was happening,” she said. “I felt like it was my fault.”
“The final straw,” Schweizer said, came on Dec. 15, when Ella and a friend saw a teacher distributing black-and-white kaffiyehs to a group of students during lunch. Some of them waved Palestinian flags.
“A light went off that they were no longer interested in protecting my child,” Schweizer said. That same week, Ella’s parents contacted the Jewish day school and arranged for Ella to return there after winter break.
‘A club you don’t want to be a part of’
Schweizer filed a formal grievance with the school district in January. Per the state’s Uniform Complaint Procedures, the district needed to respond within 60 days.
Ella and Schweizer also joined dozens of American and Israeli Jews who packed into the Santa Clara County Board of Education meeting in January to speak against the board’s proposed Gaza cease-fire resolution. (After hours of public comment, the resolution passed.)
Ella’s speech caught the attention of the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, a grassroots network of American and Israeli Jews who have been volunteering to help dozens of families navigate the complicated complaint processes for Santa Clara County schools.
When the school district didn’t reply to Schweizer’s filing within the prescribed time, BAJC helped her escalate the complaint. The district finally responded after 113 days, saying the issue was not in its purview and recommending that Schweizer file a new complaint with the California Department of Education, according to the lawsuit. After filing that complaint in June, Schweizer received a disappointing response: The complaint to the state was forwarded back to UPA because protocol required the school to address the complaint first.
Having heard nothing from UPA since leaving the school, according to Schweizer, and with no further avenues to seek accountability for Ella, the family opted for the lawsuit.
Filed Oct. 23 of this year in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, the lawsuit names as defendants the county and state educational institutions along with individuals at UPA, including Porter, the dean of students, head of student services and school counselor.
The lawsuit seeks to hold the leaders and institutions accountable for “negligence,” “infliction of emotional distress” and violations of Ella’s constitutional rights.
“I thought it was important for people to know, so it won’t happen to others,” Ella said.
There are several lawsuits pending against Bay Area K-12 schools over reported acts of antisemitism against Jewish students, as well as a proliferation of anti-Israel material distributed by teachers.
When asked about the growing number of lawsuits, Schweizer said, “That’s a club you don’t want to be part of.” But in the end, she said, the people who had a duty to protect Ella need to be held accountable.
“We say in Hebrew ‘hadag masriach me’harosh,’ which means ‘the fish smells from the head,’” Schweizer said.
Ella, now approaching her 14th birthday, recently joined a water polo team. She’s feeling safe confiding in her mom again and is overall enjoying eighth grade. She said she feels a mix of nerves and excitement about transitioning to high school next year.
“I’m just excited to start something new, because for the last year, I’ve been bouncing between two worlds, between UPA and between my current school,” Ella said. “I’m excited to have a new school where no one knows me for what happened.”