Classroom Bugged, Teachers Say in Claim : Education: The principal of Crest Community School allegedly ordered an electronic device installed. A teacher describes the incident as ‘a bad dream.’

A teacher who claimed that the principal at a Garden Grove school for troubled youths electronically bugged her classroom has filed a $1-million claim against the county Department of Education and county schools Supt. Robert Peterson, her attorney said at a press conference Wednesday.

The teacher, Barbara Kooima, tearfully described the alleged bugging incident as “a bad dream” that started in January when James W. Willard Sr., principal of Crest Community School, allegedly ordered an aide to install an electronic listening device in the classroom after a dispute last fall over Kooima’s teaching assignment.

“I found out (about the bug) on the evening of Feb. 28, and I have to tell you, I got physically sick,” said Kooima, a special education teacher at the school for seven years and a teacher for 16 years. “I worked with these people for seven years, and they were my friends.”

At a press conference at the regional office of the California Teachers Assn., Kooima’s attorney, Paul Crost, charged that an aide to Willard told two school employees that she had placed the device in Kooima’s classroom with Willard’s “knowledge and consent.”

Michelle Thomas, another Crest Community teacher who joined Kooima in the claim, said she was harassed and was placed on administrative leave early this month, allegedly after she and four other teachers participated in conversations in Kooima’s classroom about poor conditions at the school.

“I thought my room was bugged too because I would have conversations with my students and those conversations would be repeated verbatim in the (main) office,” said Thomas, an English and journalism teacher.

Crost said he and Kooima met with Dick Nagle, the county Department of Education’s personnel director, to give him a piece of the listening device, which Crost described as a small transmitter tuned into an ordinary AM-FM radio on Willard’s desk. Crost said he also informed Nagle that there were witnesses to the incident.

Nagle “took a detailed statement from (a) substitute teacher” who spoke to Irene Burton, the aide who allegedly planted the listening device, and took his findings to Peterson, Crost said. But “that was deemed to be inadequate evidence” and the county offered no compensation to Kooima, who is now on disability leave, he said.

The students who found the bug dismantled it, and only a piece of it is available as evidence, Crost said. He said that no tapes or transcripts of any conversations exist and that there are no witnesses who actually saw Willard listening in on conversations.

Willard had been principal of both Crest Community and Florence Crittenton School, another school for youths with legal or disciplinary problems run by the Juvenile Court Schools Unit of the county Department of Education. He was assigned exclusively to Crittenton shortly before the Easter break. His reassignment was unrelated to the allegations, county officials have said.

Willard could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Burton has been assigned to the county Department of Education office and is awaiting a new assignment at a school, Nagle said. She also could not be reached.

Peterson said attorneys for Burton and Willard are meeting with attorneys for the county Department of Education to discuss the legal implications of the alleged incident.

“There’s no great reason for urgency in the situation,” Peterson said. “If there are matters that permit us under the law to penalize our employees who have broken the law, we would carefully take such steps. But to do it in a frantic haste would be unfair to people who may have been unfairly smeared.”

CTA officials who joined Crost and the teachers at the press conference also charged that Peterson “is guilty of a cover-up” into the investigation and compared the alleged incident to the Watergate break-in.

“The Orange County superintendent of schools is guilty of protecting an aide, a school principal, for doing exactly what Richard M. Nixon did almost two decades ago,” CTA Vice President Del Weber said.

The CTA charges come less than a week before Peterson faces two challengers in Tuesday’s election for county superintendent. Peterson called the charges “a political assassination job by the teachers’ union leaders in support of their candidate for the superintendent’s office. It’s beautifully timed just for that.”

The CTA has endorsed Whittier College professor John F. Dean for county superintendent of schools.