Early Memo on Grading Scandal Went Unread : Education: Brea Olinda district employee’s warning last November about transcript tampering was apparently mislaid.

An employee of the Brea Olinda Unified School District alerted top administrators last November of illegal grade-changing at the district’s award-winning high school, but then-Supt. Edgar Z. Seal apparently misplaced the employee’s written warning before reading it, district records revealed Monday.

Upon finally reading a copy of the worker’s memorandum July 14, Seal--who retired in June--called the situation “a calamity of errors” in a confidential letter sent to school board members earlier this month.

Though grade and other transcript changes were first revealed publicly last month after a teacher filed a grievance, district records indicate that administrators at Brea Olinda High--and perhaps others in the district’s central office--have known about the problems for much longer.

The new details about the situation were disclosed Monday after district officials released documents in response to a California Public Records Act request from The Times. The scandal involves hundreds of transcripts that were altered so that students received double credit for the same courses, earned “pass” notations instead of poor letter grades, and had evidence of failing marks removed from their records.

Upon discovering the grade changes, Brea Olinda immediately lowered its graduation requirements for this year so no members of the Class of 1994 would be held back, and officials say that all student records have now been corrected.

Another school’s registrar and a lawyer with the Orange County Department of Education are investigating the matter.

“I’m not drawing any conclusions at this point. There were problems, we know that,” said Supt. Peggy Lynch, who took over the district’s top job this month. “We’ve got a process set up to investigate it. I want the process to be done as cleanly as possible.”

Seal has said in previous interviews that he first learned of the grade changes in February, but in a July 15 letter to the school board the former superintendent acknowledged discussing the problems with employees last fall and receiving a letter on the matter from Sally Tennison, the high school’s data systems operator.

Tennison sent an unsigned letter detailing grade-change problems to Seal on Nov. 12.

“I did not have time to open the envelope to determine what was written. I laid it on the table and to this day, I do not know whether the letter was misplaced, picked up (or) thrown away. . . . Periodically I looked for the letter but could not locate it,” Seal wrote. “I read the letter yesterday (July 14) for the first time.”

In his memo to the board, Seal said that if he had read the Nov. 12 letter last fall he “would have been at the high school as soon as I could have gotten there,” and would have shared the memo with the trustees.

Seal also indicated that Assistant Supt. Gary Goff had a copy of the letter and had reviewed it. Goff could not be reached for comment Monday.

Tennison, who has worked at the high school in various clerical posts since 1979, also could not be reached Monday.

In her three-page, single-spaced memo, Tennison said that while trying to help train the high school’s new registrar last fall, she “became very confused” by records that showed students who graduated without meeting requirements. Others, she said, got credit for taking the same course twice under different names, and had grades changed in the computer after the classes had ended.

“I believe that the present (Brea Olinda High) administration has lost sight of the excellence in education that we all cherished so much,” Tennison’s memo states. “I believe that you can sense the frustration of one (employee) . . . that has worked here for a while, whose daughter graduated from here, (and) who is very proud of this school and what it stands for.”

According to the memorandum, Tennison met with Principal John Johnson, Vice Principal Denise Jay, former registrar Joanne Rizzuto and several counselors in regard to her concerns. She refers in the letter to several attachments documenting the problems more specifically, but district officials said they have been unable to locate those records.

Lynch and Assistant Supt. Peter J. Boothroyd cautioned that much of the Nov. 12 memo is one person’s opinion. Although Tennison had access to a lot of information, they said, she is not qualified to interpret it.

“I can’t, nor would I want to, even judge whether it’s true or not true,” Boothroyd said of the memo. “She’s making a value judgment. She’s not a counselor. She’s not somebody who’s determined appropriate placement for students or even worked with parents on placement.”

Joanne Rizzuto, a former registrar at Brea Olinda who was among the whistle-blowers on the grade changing, said Monday that despite some irrelevant items, Tennison’s account is “pretty much the way it was.”

In the memo, Tennison said the high school’s transcripts “were a mess,” and she questioned the routine practice of letting students receive double credit for the same course by changing the course title on the transcript. She also noted the inconsistent policy regarding handling of F grades in classes that students repeated to earn better grades.

When a student fails a class, no credits are earned. But the grade typically remains on the student’s transcript with a notation of “credits attempted,” and is factored into grade-point averages.

According to Tennison’s memo, about 20% of the F grades on file at Brea Olinda last November had “credits attempted” removed from the transcript, thus eliminating the failing marks from grade-point averages.

Other documents show that students often had Fs changed to “pass” notations, which also are not counted in their grade-point averages. At the same time, other Fs were simply dropped from transcripts altogether.

Boothroyd said Monday that he is unsure what Brea Olinda’s policy has been regarding Fs and credits attempted.

In addition to the memos from Tennison and Seal, Brea Olinda released a list of students who repeated courses as well as the preliminary report of Rachael Alcorn, who is auditing the high school’s grade books and transcripts.

Dated June 26, 1993, the list--which is not a complete accounting of the transcript changes--shows that more than 200 students in grades 10, 11 and 12 received credit for taking the same classes twice. Their poor grades were turned into “pass” notations and the course titles were changed to “elective” titles after classes were complete. Then students took the same classes again and received letter grades.

In her first report to school board members, Alcorn provided a detailed glimpse at 10 students’ records. Two received four “pass” notations in one academic year, then repeated the same courses the following year and posted several A-minuses. It is unclear from the report what the two students’ initial grades were before they were inappropriately changed to a “pass” notation.

Times correspondent Mimi Ko contributed to this report.