County board drops claim against district

The Orange County Board of Education voted in closed session Wednesday morning to drop a lawsuit against Newport-Mesa Unified related to the recent cheating scandal at Corona del Mar High School.

The county board voted 4 to 0 — Trustee Robert Hammond abstained — to drop the lawsuit it had filed in March against the school district and five families to determine whether it had the authority to hear appeals from students who signed stipulated expulsion agreements.

In total, 11 juniors and seniors signed the agreements, which prohibited them from returning to CdM this school year, but allowed them to transfer to another school in the district.

Five families originally approached the county board in January, alleging that Newport-Mesa officials coerced the students into signing the stipulated expulsion agreements. The agreements waived the students’ rights to appeal, keeping them from making their case in front of the Newport-Mesa school board, the families had said.

By Wednesday’s meeting, only one family was still involved in the lawsuit, said Ron Wenkart, general counsel for the county department of eduction. That family plans to sue the school district.

In another motion, the board voted 3 to 1 with Ken Williams dissenting and Hammond abstaining to table the jurisdiction issue, meaning it will not hear that family’s appeal, Wenkart said.

Newport-Mesa trustee Martha Fluor said she was relieved when she heard that the county board’s lawsuit was over.

“We’re allowing the students to move forward without spending taxpayer dollars on something that’s not in the county’s jurisdiction,” she said.

The lawsuit was one of the final steps of appeal for a few of the families that were involved in the cheating scheme, in which students allegedly placed keylogging devices on teachers’ computers, captured passwords and changed grades and accessed exams.

In order to get a handle on the mounting legal costs associated with the lawsuit, Newport-Mesa agreed to change “sealed and destroyed” to “expunged” in connection with the students’ records after graduation and to clarify language in the document regarding the students’ return to CdM at the end of the school year.

District officials have maintained that the agreements are legal and that the district had sufficient evidence to expel the students.

The amount of money the district has spent in legal costs related to the cheating scheme was not available by press time.