Adriana Angulo, a spokeswoman for the district, said officials are cooperating with Costa Mesa and Newport Beach police departments in an investigation to determine a course of action; students are suspected of underage drinking.
Most of the teenage boys and girls in the photo are hamming it up for the camera, celebrating as nearly all raise their right hand to deliver what looks like the Nazi salute. A few of them are holding their phones and at least one girl appears to be taking a picture of the swastika, made up of about 100 red plastic cups.
Several outraged Instagram and Twitter users have been sharing the images, adding what they say are the names of the individuals involved — an act that is drawing some criticism from people who argue the students are too young to have their identities published.
Charlene Metoyer, president of the school board, told The Mercury News she was "simply devastated."
"As a school board, we're not only concerned by the underage drinking, but also the mental health of the students who participated in this horrendous act and all their fellow students who will be affected by it. This is appalling to not just our Jewish student community, but to all of us who care about human rights."
Keegan Hankes, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Project, told NPR that hate groups are on the rise in Orange County. Over the last year, the organization has identified eight new groups, including some that "have made a calculated attempt to bring younger people into the movement."
"We continue to be surprised that it's happening. Which is really a call for all of us to do something more," said Peter Levi of the Anti-Defamation League in Orange County. "That the current remedies of saying — 'Oh, they're just kids, oh, it's just a joke' — that is not sufficient."
Groups like Patriot Front, a spinoff of Vanguard America that was founded by Thomas Rousseau when he was 19 years old, and Identity Europa, aggressively try to recruit teens on high school and college campuses, Hankes said. He said the internet and social media outlets have proved invaluable to recruitment efforts by these groups and hastened the spread of their racist ideologies.
The Anti-Defamation League noted the largest single-year increase in anti-Semitic activity in 2017, since it began tracking incidents in 1979. As NPR's Emily Sullivan reported, that year "K-12 schools surpassed public areas as the locations with the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents."
In November, a group of Wisconsin students created a viral prom photo in which a few dozen boys posed in the Nazi salute.
A student at Newport Harbor High School told the Los Angeles Times she was not necessarily surprised by the photos featuring the swastika or the Nazi salute. Jocelyn Navarro told the paper most students self-segregate into groups of people with similar ethnic backgrounds and that she has witnessed instances of casual racism on campus.
Another Newport Harbor student, Josdel Hernandez, said some members of the junior class recently finished a lesson on the Holocaust, adding that it's unlikely the students in the photos were not aware of any offense the Nazi pose might cause.
"They showed us graphic videos of the concentration camps," she said. "It's not like our teachers need to show us any more about the Holocaust. They knew what it means."
School district leaders have scheduled two community meetings this week to discuss the offensive social media posts.
KQED's Michelle Wiley contributed to this report.
