Hearing Officer Urges Suspension for School Official

An administrative hearing officer recommended this week that Hawthorne High School Security Chief Jerome Brown, who faces dismissal on several administrative charges, including possession of cocaine, should be suspended for 15 days without pay but should not lose his job.

The district is not required to follow the recommendations of Ronald D. Wenkart, who was hired to review the proposed dismissal at Brown’s request. Nevertheless, both Brown and an attorney for the district claimed victory in Wenkart’s recommendations.

“I’m just relieved. I feel like a human being again,” Brown, 33, said in an interview Wednesday. “The whole thing was crazy and unfair. I just want to go back to work.”

But James Baca, the attorney representing the district, said he believes Wenkart’s recommendations indicate that “clearly, there are grounds for discipline, but the issue is what is the penalty going to be.

“We were vindicated,” Baca added.

Wenkart’s decision came just a few weeks after both sides filed closing arguments in the hearing on Brown’s proposed dismissal, which took place on three days between August and October. District trustees are scheduled to review the recommendations during a closed hearing Tuesday.

The district suspended Brown with pay in March after he was briefly jailed for failing to appear in court four times since 1984 on traffic citations.

After newspaper accounts reported that Brown had been arrested for possession of crack cocaine in May, 1988, and had entered a court-supervised drug counseling program, district officials sought his dismissal on grounds that he had possessed cocaine and had brought notoriety to the district. They also accused him of having interfered with the arrest of a student and passing out protest flyers during student walkouts in early March. Six other allegations were dropped.

During the hearing, in which testimony was heard from several security guards, administrators, police officers and former Supt. McKinley Nash, Brown admitted he had been found in possession of cocaine and had undergone a pretrial drug diversion program rather than fight the charge.

But Wenkart said the district cannot dismiss Brown on grounds of drug possession because the state Penal Code states that the arrest of anyone who has undergone a drug diversion program “shall be deemed to have never occurred.” Nor can the district use the disclosure of his arrest in the newspaper to dismiss him, Wenkart said.

“While it may be argued that an exception to (the code) should be made for school employees and while I personally believe such an exception should be made for the reasons stated in the district’s brief,” Wenkart said, “such an exception must be made by the Legislature.”

Baca, who called Wenkart’s view of the diversion law “conservative,” said the courts have not yet resolved how the law applies to school districts.

Wenkart also found evidence regarding Brown’s alleged interference with the arrest of a student to be “conflicting and inconclusive.” He also said the district failed to prove that Brown “encouraged students to pass out leaflets, protest or leave their classes.”

Instead, he said he based his recommendation for suspension on an incident that occurred on Aug. 23, after the hearing had begun, when Brown allegedly disobeyed his superiors and threatened Assistant Supt. Robert Church during a confrontation at district headquarters. Soon afterward, district officials suspended Brown without pay.

Although Wenkart found that testimony supported allegations that Brown was insubordinate, discourteous and willfully disobedient, he said there was no evidence of “physical threats or violence” and that the charges “on their own, do not support a dismissal action.”

Brown, who was promoted to security chief in 1988, four years after joining the district as a teaching aide, is one of several black employees who have filed racial harassment complaints with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

A state report issued in August recommended that the board of trustees, which is predominately Latino, develop programs to reduce racial conflicts in the district and appoint an ombudsman to investigate complaints. Once predominately white, the student population today is 54.4% Latino, 19.4% black, 14.8% Anglo and 8.5% Asian.

Nash, who was fired from his post as superintendent in July and is involved in litigation with the district over his contract, said in an interview Wednesday that the district used the hiring of Brown as one reason in his own firing. He also alleged that board President Pam Sturgeon pursued the case against Brown as a pay-back to a political supporter who had a personal vendetta against Brown.

“I would say the whole case against Brown was designed to humiliate and discredit African-American superintendents and administrators and was also carried out as a (pay-back) of a board member’s political backer,” Nash, who is black, said.

Sturgeon, who refused to comment on the recommendations until she reviews them, said the case against Brown “as far as I’m concerned was never pursued for those reasons.”

“I know a lot of people think what we’ve done has been based on political pay-backs,” Sturgeon added. “But that’s just not true.”