The Newport-Mesa Unified School District board voted after hours of deliberation Tuesday night to punish 11 Corona del Mar High School students accused of cheating by removing them from the school.
Just after midnight, the board emerged from a prolonged closed session to announce that it had approved all the recommendations from administrators. Many of those recommendations involved punishment that is less severe than an expulsion from the district, according to the Register’s review of the agreements.
The district could not give further specifics on the discipline, since those matters are confidential.
The vote came after a public hearing where about half a dozen people spoke, most of them calling for harsh penalties for the students. Officials have accused the students of working with a private tutor to hack into school computers to change grades and steal tests.
Police have been seeking to question Timothy Lai, the tutor, but he has disappeared.
Under agreements approved by the board, the 11 students will be allowed to attend nearby schools in the district. They also will have their disciplinary records destroyed.
“The board’s action imposes discipline upon these students for the maximum allowed by the Education Code for what occurred at Corona del Mar High School,” Board President Karen Yelsey said during her announcement of the board’s votes.
The agreements, known as stipulated expulsions, allow the district to avoid hearings where officials would be required to provide detailed evidence of the students’ wrongdoing and allow the families to respond. The parents must also agree not to challenge the punishment in court.
The Register is not naming the students because they are minors.
Six of the 11 students listed as involved in the hacking scandal have already left the district, the board stated. For those students, the board was unanimous in its approval of the recommendations. But for the remaining five still in the district, members of the board were divided.
Trustees Judy Franco, Katrina Foley and Dana Black opposed the recommendations for those five students, while the other four board members voted in favor of the recommendations in all 11 cases.
“We came to different positions on some of the cases, reflecting the individual circumstances as we each saw them,” Yelsey said at the end of the meeting. “The final votes reflect the due consideration with which the board has addressed the individual cases before us.”
District officials have said they are continuing to look into the scope of the cheating scandal, including trying to determine how many grades had been changed. District spokeswoman Laura Boss confirmed Wednesday morning that the district is now auditing about 52,000 grade changes over the span of a year to determine which grades were changed by teachers rather than hackers.
During the public hearing, Randy Zuckerman, a banker from Los Angeles, spoke in defense of the students, saying he knew some of their families. Zuckerman said he believed some of the students had been accused of cheating and hacking only because they had used the tutor involved in the scandal.
“You have children who are being railroaded because the school and the district are embarrassed,” he said.
But other speakers urged the board to harshly penalize the students to send a message that cheating would not be tolerated at the Newport Beach school, which has had similar scandals in the past.
“Cheating is a sadly normal occurrence, where the principal must be known as the reckoning force,” Dennis Ashendorf, a teacher at Monte Vista High School, the district’s continuation school, told the board. “At this very moment, parents, both singly and in loosely federated groups, are concluding that the risks in falsifying grades and violating federal laws are quite low and acceptable.”
Some speakers urged the board to expel the students from the district, as the school’s principal had recommended, rather than allowing them to enroll at nearby schools.
“This isn’t run-of-the-mill cheating,” said Yolanda Newton, who has a son at nearby Newport Harbor High. “This was premeditated, sophisticated and ongoing. If we simply allow them to change venues to a school across the bay, what is learned?”
Added Isabel Jorgensen, a 16-year-old Newport Harbor student: “They put others at risk and they put others in harm’s way and they tarnished the reputation of their high school. To hear that they might be coming to Newport Harbor High School to tarnish our reputation is equally scary and terrifying.”
The board could not disclose where the students who remained in the district might end up going to school.
Details of the alleged cheating ring were included in a police affidavit that was used to search Lai’s home and car on Dec. 18. According to the report, detectives interviewed one student who identified 11 others involved in the scheme.
The student said Lai had asked him to help him place a device called a keylogger on teachers’ computers. The device records keystrokes, including passwords. The information was used to access online grade books, according to the district.
The student said he first declined to help Lai, but eventually agreed.
While the police affidavit said a total of 12 students were possibly involved, the board voted to discipline just 11 teens. In letters sent recently to school officials and circulating around the district, the parents of three students caught up in the scandal questioned why the 12th student had been allowed to return to school. Boss declined to comment when asked why officials treated that student differently.
In their letters, the parents have also questioned why the district has singled out just one group of the students when Lai was tutoring more than 150 teens at the school.
News of the scandal broke on Dec. 18 when the district issued a press release saying it had just learned of the suspected hacking incident the day before. But the police affidavit indicates administrators knew school computers were being hacked at least six months before. In June, two girls were suspended after a teacher notified administrators that someone had possibly accessed her computer and changed grades. One of the girls told the police about a tutor, according to the affidavit.
Lai was one of more than two dozen tutors who worked with students at Corona del Mar. He had become popular and was known for his success in helping students improve their grades. He often showed up at students’ birthday parties and social gatherings.
In her statement, Boss acknowledged that the district is still looking into further hacking.
“While the current student discipline matters have concluded, the lingering effects of the hacking incident at Corona del Mar continues as part of an ongoing investigation,” she wrote.
