NY school district pays $125k settlement to HS student whose Palestine-related art they erased

Jane Khan knows what it’s like to have her identity erased in the most literal sense. As part of a years-long tradition for graduating seniors at Half Hollow Hills High School West in Dix Hills, NY, Jane received a designated parking spot in her school’s parking lot. Per the tradition, she personalized the space, painting a watermelon with a keffiyeh, symbols of Palestinian solidarity. But in September 2024, mere weeks into the new school year and without warning, school administrators painted over her design. The move came just days after a photo of the parking space was posted by an angry parent in a pro-Israel group with nearly 60k members. 

After obtaining legal advice and support, Jane and her family filed a lawsuit in March 2025, just two months into the violently chaotic early days of the second Trump administration. This was yet another period of increased fear among the Muslim-American community, when international students were being threatened with deportation simply for voicing support for Palestinians. Still, Jane—a pseudonym used in the lawsuit because she was then a minor—and her lawyers pushed forward. Now they have confirmed to The Handbasket the receipt of a $125,000 settlement check from the school district’s insurer, putting this specific situation to bed. But while Jane and her family can now move forward, the precedent of this settlement, her lawyers predict, could be just the beginning.

“Her friend had texted her like, ‘they're painting over your spot,’ and she sent a picture of it,” Jane’s mother Nighat Malik told The Handbasket. (Coincidentally or not, the incident happened on 9/11 that year.)  “She came in really upset crying, and she just wasn't even able to talk too much. She was shaking. So I immediately called the school.”

Jane’s design included the phrase “peace be upon you,” her name in Arabic, and her nickname. She’d spent two weeks before school began decorating the spot with help from others, including a close Jewish friend and the friend’s mother. 

It also included the watermelon with the keffiyeh print, which the lawsuit notes “has long been a symbol of Palestinian solidarity and pride. Because it contains the same colors as the Palestinian flag, it arose as a symbol to replace display of the flag itself, which was banned by Israel in 1967.” Only the keffiyeh-print watermelon was painted over. 

Malik, Jane’s mother, says the principal even commented that he thought the art was great when he first saw it. But she says when she spoke to him the day it was painted over, the principal told her it was beyond his control. He attributed the decision to then-Superintendent Dr. Patrick Harrigan. (Harrigan resigned from his job two weeks later after 20 years in the district to take a less powerful job in a smaller district for significantly less money. He was recently named the incoming Superintendent of Patchogue-Medford School District.) 

A school board meeting the following Monday drew a large audience, with members of the local Muslim community speaking in support of Jane’s artwork. There were also multiple voices in support of the school’s decision. 

Among the crowd was Christina John, a lawyer from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, New York (CAIR-NY) who called the district’s move “a blatant First Amendment violation.” Malik had reached out to the organization and the CAIR-NY team enlisted Brooklyn-based civil rights attorney Andrew Stoll to help represent Jane and her mother. By early 2025, a robust and motivated legal team had assembled to seek justice for Jane.

“Our client and her family were really brave and courageous to say, ‘we believe in this and we have to go forward. And we understand potential risks,’” John told The Handbasket earlier this week. 

In a June hearing with Senior District Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto of the Eastern District of New York, the defense signaled an early effort to dismiss while Jane’s team made it clear they were ready to go to trial. Judge Matsumoto made it clear during a June hearing that it was her strong recommendation for both parties to reach a settlement.

“At that point [the defense] understood we were gonna get into discovery, and we were gonna get every email and every message and every communication among board members, between board members and the Zionist community, all the lunatic rantings from people across the country reaching out to the school board because they saw something on Facebook,” Stoll told The Handbasket this week.  

With a potentially embarrassing discovery process looming, the district seemed much more willing to settle the case.

So much of the negotiations came down to one word: intended. The then-Superintendent said at the September 16th board meeting that he did not believe Jane intended any offense or hate with her art. But email communications reviewed by The Handbasket show the defense insisted “intended” be included in an official apology, which Jane’s lawyers felt was a result of them wanting to leave the door open for possible action against students in the future. 

“We wanted an unambiguous statement that this is not hateful,” Stoll said. “We needed them to concede that it was not reasonable to ban the watermelon or the keffiyeh.”

In the end, this one word led to the apology being scrapped altogether—and to the defendants asking the plaintiffs to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) related to the entire matter. Ultimately the parties agreed to a final number of $125,000, with no NDA, no apology, and no liability for the defense. 

How the parties came to this agreement and what it says about the First Amendment as applied to speech about Palestine is another story in and of itself. 

Jane was hardly the first student in the district’s two high schools to use her stretch of pavement for a political message. In the past, a student painted a Black Lives Matter fist. Another painted a Pride flag. There were also spots with the American Flag, Italian Flag, and the “Betsy Ross Flag,” which the lawsuit complaint notes is “an early version of the American flag that has been largely adopted as a symbol by extremist, racist movements in the United States.” None of those designs were altered. So why was Jane’s different?

The difference, it seems, was outside attention.

At 10pm on Friday, September 6, 2024, a Facebook user named Leslie Richard posted a photo of Jane’s parking spot to a private group called “Never Forget Jewish Lives Matter.” Along with the image, Richard wrote, to the group’s then 58k members: “This is a painted student parking space in the student lot at the local hs. An individual student painted her spot. Suggestions on how to demand it be removed? For all of my neighbors in this group. Call the superintendent.” 

Malik confirmed that the original post was made by another Half Hollow Hills West parent—one who she’d known peripherally since both of their kids were young.

Debate in the comments quickly ensued, with perspectives pretty evenly split on whether or not Jane’s art constituted a problem.

One commenter wrote: “The watermelon is offensive and does not belong on a mural painted on a parking spot for a graduation [sic] senior. It is a political statement, no different than painting a confederate flag. We all know the implications behind that, this should be treated the same way.”

Another member argued: “This is a personal parking spot and are you going to complain about a Star of David or a Cross? One of the hallmarks that makes this country great is that the first amendment protects our freedom of speech as well as our freedom of expression. This child has the right to express themselves the same way our children do. EVEN if it makes us uncomfortable.”

First thing Monday morning, Jane was called into the principal’s office.

“Without so much as a call to Ms. Khan’s parents, the Principal and another administrator interrogated her in a closed office about the meaning of her artwork and threatened that ‘some action would have to be taken,’” the lawsuit complaint states. “Through tears at her interrogation, Ms. Khan explained her artwork was related to her identity as a Muslim and a person of Pakistani descent; she explained her people’s connection to Palestine, and the cultural significance of the keffiyeh design, and her interest in advocating for Palestine.”

Indeed, Jane’s connections to Palestine were and remain potent. According to her mother, Jane had a Palestinian friend who ended up moving back there. They have a relative whose spouse is Palestinian. And a family friend is a Palestinian refugee living in the US, who’s had 135 family members killed in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For Malik’s daughter, Palestinian safety and freedom was not a remote, abstract cause, but one very near to her heart. 

“We've seen and experienced firsthand people who are affected,” Malik told me.

Yet the district claimed Jane’s designs was tantamount to hate speech. “Regardless of plaintiff’s intentions, the message imprinted on school property contained an image that either was, or was reasonably interpreted as, an expression of anti-Semitism and support for a terrorist organization,” the school district’s lawyer, Steven C. Stern, wrote. 

Stern continued: “Any student, teacher, or member of the public could have driven into the parking lot and reasonably understood the school was endorsing a political message—or worse, anti-Semitic hate speech—by allowing it. The District must be allowed to regulate a painting like this on its own parking lot.”

To support this reading, the district offered an NPR article titled, “What is a keffiyeh, who wears it, and how did it become a symbol for Palestinians?” Yet far from bolstering their case, the article seemed to undercut it. As Jane’s lawyer’s responded, the gist of the article “is that people wearing the keffiyeh as a symbol of identity or solidarity are unreasonably targeted by violent racists.”  The article describes the shooting of three Palestinian-American men in Vermont who were wearing keffiyehs, and a Brooklyn father being accosted in a park—in front of his 18-month-old child—for wearing one.  

“Defendants’ identification with the article’s murderous bigots driven mad by a keffiyeh is their prerogative,” the response continued. “But where they cave to similar bigotry to suppress Plaintiff’s speech, the First Amendment would like a word.”

All of it put together—the apparent lack of school policy about parking lot designs, the erroneous claim of hate speech—seemed to persuade the judge that Jane had a strong First Amendment case. Settling, she suggested, would be in the best interest of both parties.

“I think that what we have here is a decision by the superintendent and the principal to paint over this parking spot after the superintendent has acknowledged that this was not hate speech,” Judge Matsumoto said during the June hearing, per a court transcript.

“My concern is that the school district has not been neutral, although they claim neutrality,” the judge said at another point. “They have not been neutral on issues that they posted on their website and decisions that they've made. And I think that the viewpoint discrimination is fairly clearly alleged.”

While the defense counsel tried to argue that Jane’s art created “potential disruption” to the school environment, Judge Matsumoto was having none of it. 

“Well, when you permitted parking spaces to be painted with a Pride flag, did you request that opposing viewpoints against gay rights also be displayed? Or when you had a parking spot that said ‘Black Lives Matter,’ did you also have an opposing viewpoint for that?” the judge asked. “I don't think that the school board, frankly, or the school can have it both ways in terms of the viewpoint discrimination that is alleged here adequately, in my view.”

In October of last year, settlement talks began in earnest, with both parties agreeing that it would include both a public, written apology to Jane from the district as well as a monetary sum. After a few months of going back and forth on the language, in late January of this year the two parties agreed on a final version of a public statement that satisfactorily recognized Jane’s art did not constitute any form of hate, along with $100,000. 

But in early March, suddenly the district’s tune changed, email communications reveal. They communicated to Stoll and his team that the statement would not be approved in its current form, jeopardizing the entire settlement altogether. They also asked for the plaintiffs to sign NDAs. Jane and her lawyers wouldn’t agree, finally countering with a greater monetary ask in lieu of the apology and with no NDA. The extra $25,000, it seemed, was worth it to the district to avoid the apology. Both parties also agreed that the district would admit no wrongdoing or violation of law. 

I asked Stoll what message he believes is being sent by the large settlement number.  “I don't think there's any question that demonstrates that they knew they were going to lose this case, that it indicates that they knew that they absolutely violated this young woman's First Amendment rights and that one way or another, they were going to have to pay.”

Stern, the lawyer for the school district, has not yet responded to The Handbasket’s request for comment. 

With Jane now in college and the settlement concluded, Malik is happy to move forward, but understands the potential legacy and precedent set by her and her daughter’s legal battle.

“As much as I would want to protect my child going forward and just move on from it and let this be a learning experience for the school as well as her, our family, and our community,” Malik said, “I hope that it would really encourage any minority and the Muslim community and the Palestinian community to not be silenced and not be censored, and to know that they have the right and their voice matters.”

Story edited by Jesse Hicks