The teacher at the center of a dispute involving pages in the Palmer High School yearbook countered students’ accounts of why some pages were changed.

“The spread was pulled because of excessive PDA (public display of affection) in three of the photos,” said Angela Selman, Palmer yearbook advisor and social studies teacher.

Students are sticking by their story, saying Selman took unwarranted action over a photo of a lesbian couple holding hands. They said they felt they had to go public with the dispute because their concerns about possible discrimination were not being addressed.

The matter is being investigated by the Colorado Springs School District 11 ombudsman. The Office of Equal Opportunity Programs and Ombudservices has 14 days from when the complaint was filed on Monday to complete an investigation and report, unless an extension is granted by the superintendent.

“The picture that the media has shown of the girls in question, holding hands, was never in the spread,” Selman said. “I would have never pulled a picture of two girls holding hands from a yearbook.”

District 11 personnel have recovered two pages and other items that were deleted from yearbook computers, district spokeswoman Devra Ashby said Friday.

“It is a recovered version,” she said. “It’s the only one we’ve been able to find.”

Information technology employees are trying to determine who made any changes to the pages before they were deleted, and when such changes were made. The district is looking into the possibility that the pages were manipulated, she said.

In pages that have not been released by the district but that Selman showed the Gazette, the main photo is of a boy and girl kissing lip to lip.

Ashby said that is a clear example of “excessive physical display of affection” that is not allowed on school grounds, according to district regulations.

Yearbook Editor in Chief Anna Carmichael said she didn’t see the finished relationships page before it was deleted.

Palmer senior and lifestyles editor for the yearbook Rodolfo “Coco” Toribio, 18, was responsible for the relationships pages. He said the main photo on the recovered pages had been changed from his version, asserting that he was told to cut a gay couple or the entire spread would be cut.

Selman didn’t mention inappropriate kissing until after students went to the principal, Toribio said.

Carmichael and Toribio said Selman wouldn’t talk to them about the decisions. Toribio said six or seven students heard the exchange that started the dispute.

“It’s so ‘he said, she said,’” said Carmichael, 18. “They have a lot more power.”

In an interview late Thursday, Selman said: “I want to set the record straight on what I said to the student life editor about pulling the page. I told him, ‘you pull the page or I will.’”

When Toribio asked what he should tell his friends about the page being pulled, Selman said she told him that she didn’t care what he told his friends since yearbook is not about his friends.

Selman said after the relationships page was deleted, she learned from a district official that the primary complaint was that students wanted more diversity in the yearbook.

She offered the students the assignment on diversity pages aimed at getting the students on the yearbook staff to find and get to know students different from them, she said.

But issues over those pages led to another dispute, during which two students said they were asked to leave class and two others walked out, the students said.

“I have been a District 11 teacher for 14 years at Palmer, and I have always shown the same level of dignity and respect to all students,” Selman said.

—Contact Kristina Iodice: 636-0162 Twitter @GazetteKristina Facebook Kristina Iodice