Brea Olinda Graduated Some Who Lack Credits : Education: Principal also knew of the grade-changing but did not tell his superiors: ‘I think that was a bad decision on my part.’

BREA —  About a dozen members of the Brea Olinda High School Class of 1993 graduated without meeting the school’s requirements due to illegal transcript changes, district records revealed Tuesday, and the school’s principal was told of widespread transcript-changing as early as last July but never alerted his superiors.

Records and interviews show that Principal John Johnson had several meetings with half a dozen school employees throughout the school year to discuss the transcript changes, in which hundreds of students received credit for taking the same courses twice, had poor grades changed to “pass” notations and had evidence of failing marks removed from their records.

At an October meeting, Johnson called a halt to the practice of changing grades and course titles, but decided not to correct transcripts for students in the Class of 1994 and to only partially correct those in the Class of 1995.

“I felt it was too late to make any changes as far as seniors were concerned because it would affect their graduation,” he said in an interview Tuesday evening.

Though he was aware that changing a recorded grade violates the state’s Education Code, Johnson added: “We didn’t think about it in terms of it being illegal. Our first concern was our seniors graduating.”

Officials of the Brea Olinda Unified School District have previously said that former counselors at the award-winning school changed grades and course titles hundreds of times in an effort to boost grade-point averages and help students get into college.

Though employee whistle-blowers told the superintendent of the situation as early as February, the problem came to the attention of the school board and the public only after a teacher filed a grievance in May.

In June, school board members ordered all transcripts corrected, and lowered the school’s graduation requirements for this year only so no seniors--whose corrected transcripts would now lack sufficient courses--would be held back.

A registrar from another school and an attorney from the Orange County Department of Education are investigating the matter for the school district.

On Tuesday, Trustee Todd Spitzer blasted Johnson for not informing his superiors, and said that depending on the outcome of the investigation, he might recommend his firing.

“It’s incredibly outrageous that the principal of our high school made a decision of this magnitude without consulting the board of education or asking for a legal opinion on whether or not what he was doing is even lawful,” Spitzer said. “John Johnson showed absolutely no leadership in his position as principal.”

One of the documents released Tuesday is a confidential memo Joanne Rizuto wrote to her own personnel file upon her resignation in May as the school’s registrar. In it, she says that administrators ignored the transcript problems for months, and then continued making illegal grade changes even after a February directive from the district office designed to curtail the practice.

“It has been a very difficult year,” Rizuto wrote. “It was very difficult to make changes on transcripts . . . that I felt were unethical and not in keeping with the standards that (Brea Olinda) portrayed.”

Also Tuesday, Gary Goff, assistant superintendent for business services, said that while he learned of the transcript problems at the high school last fall, he took no action because it was outside his purview and he believed that the superintendent, who retired in June, had also been alerted.

Meanwhile, Spitzer praised Rizuto and another whistle-blower, data systems operator Sally Tennison.

“People should stand up and salute these two women for what they have done in terms of bringing the truth to this whole saga,” he said.

Rizuto’s memo and an addendum concerning repeat credits--both released Tuesday--provide the most detailed account to date of the scandal swirling around one of Orange County’s most prestigious high schools, which last year was named a Blue Ribbon school, the nation’s highest academic honor.

In the first indication that members of the Class of 1993 were affected, Rizuto’s memo says that “approximately 13-17 students” inappropriately received diplomas though they did not pass sufficient math courses.

Johnson said Tuesday evening that he decided not to address that situation last July because “those students were special education students and . . . given some special dispensation because of their special education status.”

District officials could not provide any information on those students.

A state law bars schools from changing transcripts after students graduate. Spitzer said that while it may be impossible, legally, to retract the diplomas, he hopes to “go back as far as necessary to clean up our records.”

Rizuto’s memo also provides more detail about the widespread changing of course titles and grades changed after classes were complete.

Students who chose to repeat an academic class, in which they earned a poor grade, often received credit twice for the same course when they should not have, and had the low grade replaced with a “pass” notation, which is not factored in to grade-point averages.

Others who received Ds or Fs and then repeated the courses had their transcripts altered so the low grades would not count toward their GPA. That happened 61 times for the classes of 1993, 1994 and 1995, according to Rizuto’s memo.

Overall, Rizuto says, students in those classes had changes in 163 math grades, 126 Spanish or French grades and 35 in other courses.

On Tuesday, Johnson expressed regret that he never went to the superintendent or the school board with the problem.

“I just felt that we could handle it internally. . . . I think that was a bad decision on my part,” said Johnson, who became principal in 1990. “Some mistakes were made, and that can happen in this kind of situation. Not a day goes by that mistakes aren’t made. You try to correct them and you go on.”

Times correspondent Mimi Ko contributed to this report.