Biological Mom Wants Jimmy Peters Back : Family: The Colorado woman last saw troubled O.C. special-ed student shortly after his birth.

The mother of the 6-year-old special-education student whose school district went to court last month to oust him from his kindergarten class said Friday she will soon file for custody of the boy because she believes his father is exploiting him.

Lilia A. Rodriguez, a 28-year-old Aurora, Colo., hairstylist who lost custody of Jimmy Peters shortly after his birth and has not seen him in five years, said she decided to take action when she learned of the recent battle over the child’s education.

Rodriguez has contacted a Newport Beach attorney, hoping to remove Jimmy from the center of an increasingly bitter dispute at Circle View Elementary school, where school officials say he has been repeatedly disruptive and violent.

“I don’t want my son used as a pawn,” said Rodriguez, who intends to take Jimmy to Colorado. “I have never done anything good for Jimmy, and now is my chance.

“I want custody. I want to do what is right,” said Rodriguez, who lived with Jimmy’s father, James D. Peters III, for several years but never married him and is raising two other children on her own.

But Peters responded that “I have full custody of (Jimmy), so that sounds like something that’s going to happen a long time down the road, if it happens at all.”

Meanwhile, Jim Peters and Ocean View School District personnel agreed Friday that the boy will receive one-on-one lessons at Circle View Elementary this summer, temporarily solving the fierce battle over whether Jimmy should be schooled in a regular or special-education classroom.

At a three-hour meeting Friday morning, Peters and district officials arranged for Jimmy to have private, two-hour sessions with a teacher for 29 days this summer. The plan is a compromise between the district’s desire to place him in a special-education class and Peters’ insistence that he learn in a mainstream classroom.

Peters says his son suffers from a communication disorder, but district officials contend that his disability is more severe and includes characteristics of autism.

Peters and school officials will decide this summer whether Jimmy will be in a regular or special-education classroom for first grade next fall.

Calling the arrangement a “hodgepodge program,” Peters said he agreed to the one-on-one schooling only because the district had refused to provide adequate support for Jimmy in a mainstream classroom during the summer session.

“They are being totally unreasonable,” Peters said after the meeting. “They won’t stop attacking little Jimmy.”

But Ocean View Supt. James R. Tarwater said Friday he believes one-on-one sessions are the only reasonable alternative to special education for Jimmy. “He won’t be able to handle summer school (if it is in a regular classroom),” he said. “It would be a nightmare.” Peters, who in federal court documents said he has been unemployed since 1989 and receives government assistance, has been battling Ocean View officials for years, contending that the district was not trying hard enough to meet Jimmy’s special needs.

Peters insisted this year that Jimmy remain in a mainstream kindergarten class despite what the district alleged were repeated incidents in which Jimmy disrupted the class with screaming and violent tantrums. Peters denies the allegations.

But the situation blew up this spring, when Jimmy allegedly bit his teacher and the district went to court May 25, seeking to permanently oust him from the classroom. In the first case of its kind in Orange County history, a federal court judge ordered Jimmy back to the classroom after a three-week absence, touching off a raucous June 9 demonstration by parents of some of the other children on the day Jimmy returned.

Now, it appears the case is once again headed to a courtroom.

Newport Beach attorney Terri Cleland said she spent Friday collecting documents and investigating whether California is the appropriate jurisdiction for a custody battle between Peters and Rodriguez. Jimmy was born in Las Vegas, and that is where Peters won sole, legal custody of the boy in 1988, both parents said.

“At this point it looks like I’m going to be (representing her),” Cleland said. “I’m just doing some fact-finding myself,” she added. “At this point, I have no idea if she can get custody or not.”

Rodriguez said acquaintances in Orange County contacted her after reading news accounts of Jimmy’s battle with the school district. She said she decided to pursue custody of Jimmy, in part out of concern for his educational future.

“I believe (Jimmy) is being deprived of the proper education that he needs. Special-needs classrooms--I believe that’s what he needs,” Rodriguez said Friday. “I’m not a professional, I have to read up on it, I have to call my principal and the teachers . . . but I know that I can help him. I want to save him. I want him to turn out to be the best kid and adult that he can.”

Tarwater, who has already been contacted by Rodriguez, said that if Jimmy’s mother attains even partial custody of him, it could have a major impact on the struggles over the boy’s educational plan.

“If she wants him in the special day class and he wants him in a mainstream class, then the fight would be between them--not us,” he said. “We’d be out of it.”

Peters has long been married to Renee Harris Peters, a Westminster hairstylist. Rodriguez said she met Peters 10 years ago, while she was working as a receptionist at a Colorado hair salon the couple owned.

She said she moved with Peters to Sacramento when the salon closed in 1985. They lived together for several years and had moved to Las Vegas by the time Jimmy was born on Dec. 14, 1987, according to interviews with Rodriguez and Jim Peters’ friends and relatives.

Jim Peters declined to comment on Rodriguez’s version of those events. He also refused to discuss where he and Jimmy are living.

But Peters said custody is not the immediate issue facing Jimmy. “This whole thing is about education, and full inclusion, and Jimmy’s rights, those things . . . there’s just nothing to comment on (custody) realistically.”

Renee Peters, who has acted as Jimmy’s mother for years, said Friday that she had no comment on any aspect of the situation.

Jimmy’s birth and custody records are closed to the public, but Rodriguez said she and Peters split up shortly after Jimmy’s birth. Rodriguez said she returned to Colorado from Las Vegas with Jimmy and Sabrina, her daughter from another relationship who is now 8, and initially won custody of Jimmy in court.

But Peters won custody of the boy months later, Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez, who is identified as Jimmy’s mother in legal documents obtained by The Times, said she lost custody in a hearing that she did not attend. “He got custody, not because I was an unfit mom, but because I didn’t know about the hearing.”

Rodriguez said she was awarded supervised visitation rights, but has seen Jimmy only twice--when Peters brought the boy to Colorado--because she did not know where he was living in California.

Rodriguez, who grew up in Colorado, now lives with Sabrina and another daughter, 3-year-old Patricia, in a two-bedroom, two-story townhome in Aurora, a suburb of 228,000 people east of Denver.

Her only memento of Jimmy is a videotape of him playing as a toddler.

“You have good times with the kids you do have,” Rodriguez said, choking on sobs. “I lived, but it’s like I’m alive physically . . . but I’ve always been dead. My heart has never been healed.”

Times correspondent Kristina Lindgren in Denver contributed to this report.