LAGUNA NIGUEL : Expulsion Urged for Pupil in Gun Offense

A Capistrano Unified School District disciplinary panel has recommended the expulsion of a 13-year-old Laguna Niguel student who brought a loaded semiautomatic handgun to Niguel Hills Intermediate School after a classmate allegedly threatened him.

The ruling comes a week after a rare public expulsion hearing in which the boy’s father, Mark Lopez, argued that his son should be expelled for the offense, but that school officials could have done more to prevent the March 1 incident.

Lopez also asked that his son be allowed to return to school next year. Board trustees will vote April 19 on the expulsion recommendation.

“My son was wrong to bring a weapon onto campus, but my son was operating under fear of his life,” Lopez said at the hearing. “No child should go to school daily in fear.”

During the expulsion hearing last week, Lopez said school officials are not doing enough to combat racial and other tensions at the school, tensions that led his son to have the handgun.

Lopez testified that he met with Principal Jean Trygstad Feb. 26 to tell her about the conduct of another youth on campus, who he said verbally and physically threatened his son.

Trygstad said she informed the vice principal assigned to the youth about Lopez’s complaints after the meeting, which was on a Friday, but did not take further action because Lopez did not tell her of any specific threats made against his son. The boy brought the handgun, which belonged to his father and was hidden in a bedroom, to school the following Monday.

Now, in response to the incident, Lopez has formed a community group to discuss school safety, Student Education Toward Non-Violence on Campus and Teaching Respect for All Youth. The group will hold a town hall forum on April 17 from 7 to 9:30 p.m. in the South Coast YMCA Gymnasium at Crown Valley Community Park.

“Questions of safety and an attitude of intolerance among the students in our schools need to be examined and addressed,” Lopez said. “The first step is to get parents and the community involved.”

Supt. James A. Fleming said he welcomes more involvement from parents but suggested that Lopez might better focus his “attention on his own home and his own child.”

The school district, in cooperation with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, is already teaching Niguel Hills students about nonviolent conflict resolution and that multicultural issues are also addressed in the classroom, the superintendent said.

“Niguel Hills is not a school that is rife with violence,” Fleming said. “It is your average middle school. It has high academic standards. It has a well-behaved student body.”

Since being arrested by sheriff’s deputies, the teen-age boy has pleaded guilty to a felony charge of bringing a weapon onto school grounds and is serving a 120-day sentence in Juvenile Hall, his father said.