Expulsion Likely for Youths Caught in School Drug Sting

As a junior at Huntington Beach High last year, Brian Scott McLeod batted a record eight home runs for the school’s baseball team.

With that reputation as a slugger for the Oilers, the 18-year-old looked forward after graduation next spring to a possible career in the pros.

But McLeod’s baseball dreams have been derailed, at least temporarily. School district officials said Friday that the eight students arrested this week, including McLeod, in an undercover drug sting at their schools almost certainly will be expelled.

“I’m very upset,” McLeod’s father, Donald, said tearfully Friday morning. “My boy has never been involved with drugs in any way. The only reason he got involved in this is they put a very pretty girl in his classroom and she said she wanted some marijuana for a party. He gave her some because he liked her, just like all the other boys.”

The pretty girl was one of four teen-age Huntington Beach police cadets who spent the past eight weeks posing as students in the Huntington Beach Union High School District as part of a cooperative police/school effort to crack down on campus drug dealers.

Police on Thursday arrested eight students on suspicion of selling small quantities of cocaine and marijuana at Huntington Beach High, Ocean View High, Edison High and Marina High. Names of the others, boys 14 through 17, were not released because they are juveniles.

On Friday, the juveniles remained in custody at Orange County Juvenile Hall in Orange. They are expected to be released this weekend. McLeod was released Thursday from Huntington Beach City Jail on $5,000 bail. All face possible felony charges.

McLeod, who pitched and fielded for the Oilers in his three years with the varsity team, declined comment Friday. His father said McLeod was shaken by the arrest. The elder McLeod retained a lawyer Friday afternoon to challenge the police arrest, which he called entrapment.

But the parent of a 17-year-old arrested at Huntington Beach High Thursday praised the police. The mother, who requested anonymity, said her son had a long history of drug abuse and that counseling programs had not helped.

“Maybe now he can get some help,” the mother said, brushing away tears. “I do agree with what the police did. Some kids need to be shook up.”

School principals said the students arrested will almost certainly be suspended when they return to school, probably Monday. Leon Stoabs, assistant principal at Huntington Beach High, said the dean or principal of each school will meet with the students and their parents at that time.

Once the student is suspended, the school has five days to recommend an expulsion to the district’s school board, said Ira Tobin, principal at Marina High. In cases of suspected drug dealing on campus, state law requires principals to recommend expulsion, unless the student was wrongfully arrested or mentally impaired, Tobin said.

The board sets a hearing date, usually within a month, at which the principal serves as prosecutor and the student and his parents as the defense. The school board sits as a jury.

If the board members decide to expel the student, as school officials say they almost always do upon the recommendation of a principal, the student can appeal to the Orange County Department of Education and, ultimately, to Superior Court.

The students also can apply for admission to another school district or wait until the next school year when, by law, they are allowed to re-enroll at their old schools.

Tobin and other school officials said Friday that the punishment is intended to keep drugs off campus.

“What we’re saying is that dealers are not going to be tolerated,” Tobin said. “You’re always torn between what is best to do for an individual student and what is best for all students. But even though your emotions may be tearing at you to bend over backward and help this kid in need, your obligation is to the larger community, even if it is at the expense of the single individual.

‘Got Caught’

“The other deciding factor for me is that they got caught doing it. If the same kid came to me and said, ‘I have a problem and I need help,’ then we would move heaven and earth to help that kid. The fact that he was caught makes a difference in my mind.”

Tobin rejects Donald McLeod’s arguments that his son was seduced into providing drugs and that the amount he allegedly sold, two marijuana cigarettes, was relatively small.

“What’s the difference between a pretty girl employed as an undercover agent and a pretty girl who is a student? If a kid is going to respond by delivering drugs, that is wrong, and it should not be tolerated,” Tobin said. “And even if it’s only a couple of (marijuana) joints today, it might be two more tomorrow, two more the day after that and so on. It’s the principle of the thing you’re after.”

Joe Symkowick, general counsel for the Department of Education in Sacramento, said most school districts in the state now routinely expel students who are caught dealing drugs on campus.

Figures compiled by the Department of Education show that the school districts have cause for concern: The state’s 1,026 school districts reported 20,196 drug- and alcohol-related incidents by students in the 1985-1986 school year, the first year these have been reported to the state. Figures for the 1986-1987 school year are still being compiled.