School District Probes Charge That Principal Lowered Grade

Los Angeles school district officials Wednesday said they are investigating allegations that the principal of Sutter Junior High School in Canoga Park changed a student’s grade to a lower mark earlier this year over protests by the boy’s teacher.

United Teachers of Los Angeles, the largest union in the district, asked for the investigation after English teacher Marion Vogler reported that Principal Edward Moreno changed a seventh-grader’s mark to “fail” from a D. In the Los Angeles school district, a D stands for “barely passing.”

Vogler also said Moreno changed two grades of “satisfactory” for work habits and cooperation to “unsatisfactory.”

Moreno said Wednesday that he could not comment “because of the investigation going on.”

Rules on Changes

The state Education Code prohibits principals from changing a student’s grade unless there is a “clerical or mechanical mistake, fraud, bad faith or incompetency,” but the code does not provide penalties for infractions.

According to the teacher’s union, the seventh-grader received a mid-year transfer to Sutter from Northridge Junior High School because of behavior problems. The hope was that a new environment would improve the student’s behavior, said Roger Segure, the union’s director of grievance processing.

Vogler told union officials that she and the youth made an agreement that, if his conduct and academic performance improved, he would receive a grade higher than the F and two unsatisfactories he received in English at Northridge Junior High.

After only a few weeks, the student was transferred back to Northridge. No reason was made public. Vogler was asked to give him a grade. Because he was in her class for a short time, Vogler said she gave the student a grade of NM, for “no mark.”

Sutter administrators requested that she give the student a letter grade, Vogler told the union. She changed the grade to D, with work habit and cooperation grades of “satisfactory.”

Segure said Vogler was surprised to discover that the student’s English grade was later changed to an F.

Vogler wrote a letter to Moreno about the grade change, Segure said. Moreno replied in a letter to Vogler. Dissatisfied with Moreno’s response, Vogler wrote to the union.

“I feel saddened and betrayed by administration in regard to this boy, who made a sincere effort to get out of his ‘fail U U’ rut,” Vogler wrote to the union.

On Wednesday, a meeting on the dispute was held at a regional headquarters in Van Nuys.

“This is a personnel matter,” which district regulations do not allow administrators to discuss in public, said Kathryn S. Lee, the regional superintendent. “It will be resolved. There are a lot of big questions to be asked on all sides.”

Administrators’ Approach

Bill Rivera, special assistant to the district superintendent, said top district administrators want to settle the dispute by “letting Moreno work it out with the teacher.”

Two years ago the district officially reprimanded former Granada Hills High School Principal Albert E. Irwin Jr. for removing a “fail” grade from a student’s record. The grade change allowed the student to qualify for extracurricular activities under the district’s “C-average, no fail” rule and thus continue playing in the school band.

For the past two years, the teachers union has backed state legislation that would add mandatory penalties to the prohibition against changing grades. Last year the bill died after Gov. George Deukmejian refused to sign it. This year, said an aide to the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles), the bill died when there were not enough votes to move it out of the Senate Appropriations Committee.