60 Students Suspended in Bus Drinking Incident

All 60 Calabasas High School students who traveled to a campus dance last weekend on chartered buses stocked with alcoholic beverages will be suspended, school officials ruled Tuesday.

The ousters probably will last five days and begin Thursday, Principal Robert Ross said.

Ross said the suspensions were ordered after administrators of the Las Virgenes Unified School District campus interviewed students who took part in the bus trip, which ended with a brawl in the school’s main office and the arrest of three adult chaperones.

School officials next will seek criminal charges against the operators of the two charter buses on grounds they contributed to the delinquency of minors, Ross said.

The suspensions were announced as parents of some of the students complained that authorities had handled the incident badly.

“I’ll sue if I can,” said Ted Sirkin, the father of a student on the bus and uncle of one of the 21-year-old chaperones arrested by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies.

Sirkin said school officials ordered the chartered buses to leave the campus empty, forcing the young passengers to find rides home after Saturday night’s dance.

“If they thought my son had been drinking, it was incumbent of them to provide him with transportation home,” Sirkin said.

“I don’t condone kids drinking,” said one mother, who asked not to be named, “but if they’re going to drink, at least this way we know they’re not driving drunk.”

School officials defended the suspensions and their order to sheriff’s deputies to enter the buses outside the dance to confiscate beer, wine, champagne, vodka and other alcoholic beverages.

“I’m not going to applaud them or their parents for hiring a rolling bar,” Las Virgenes School Supt. Albert D. Marley said. “I hope the message is very clear. Use of alcohol and other drugs by minors is illegal.”

County lawyers have been asked to investigate whether the school district has the authority to pursue criminal complaints against the bus operators, Ross said. Officials have not yet firmly established the identities of the charter companies involved, he said.

Meanwhile, the three Van Nuys residents arrested after serving as volunteer chaperones on one of the buses said they will join Sirkin in pursuing a police-brutality complaint against a deputy involved in Saturday’s fracas.

Kari Ann Chezum, who faces four misdemeanor charges and was involved in a scuffle with a deputy that left the high school’s glass front door smashed, said students on her bus were well-behaved. Youngsters provided their own beverages for the trip, she said.

“I heard one of the buses was really rowdy and that the kids got intoxicated. But not on our bus,” Chezum said.