School Hit by Scandal Welcomes Fresh Start : Education: With classes resuming today, students, teachers at Brea Olinda High seek to overcome grade-changing controversy.

When Brea Olinda High School journalism students return to school today, their first assignment will be to investigate the transcript tampering scandal that surfaced last spring, clouded the summer and is yet to be resolved.

“I’m going to ask my students to get the story and try to find out the source of the problem,” said Dorcas Hufferd, the school’s journalism teacher, who spent Wednesday preparing her classroom for the students’ arrival. “I’m going to make sure that they do a very thorough job, because one of the things that helped this situation was getting it out in the open.”

Teachers and students on the campus of the award-winning school Wednesday acknowledged that the grade-changing controversy--which involved about 600 alterations to student transcripts, many of them illegal--has tarnished the school’s reputation--and has prompted them to strive to regain it.

“It’s going to be a real hard job,” said Kristi Liscon, 16, a cheerleader who was practicing in the school’s dance gymnasium Wednesday. “No one respects this school or the (administrators) anymore . . . and it’s going to be hard to build school spirit again.”

Despite the negative publicity over the summer, Assistant Supt. Peter J. Boothroyd said, dozens of parents from outside the school’s attendance boundaries have been trying to enroll their children at the high school, which last year was named a Blue Ribbon school, the nation’s highest academic honor. About a dozen names have been placed on a waiting list, Boothroyd said.

“People know it’s a good school,” Supt. Peggy Lynch said.

“The teachers and students are not at fault,” Hufferd added. “So basically, education is going to be the same. The quality is still the same.”

The transcript tampering was brought to light when a former math teacher filed a grievance with the teachers union in May after discovering that one of her students’ grades had been altered without her permission.

After a two-month investigation, an independent auditor hired by the school district revealed in August that hundreds of students had letter grades illegally changed to “pass” notations or received double credit when they repeated a course to improve their grades.

The auditor also reported that Brea Olinda inconsistently calculated failing marks in a student’s grade-point average if he or she repeated the course and posted a passing grade.

Principal John Johnson admitted that he knew of the grade changes as early as July, 1993, but did not alert his superiors. School trustees, who first became aware of the problem after the grievance was brought to their attention in May, took action to correct it and launched a separate investigation to determine who was responsible.

That probe by an attorney for the county Department of Education is not complete.

Cheryl Liberty, who advises the school’s cheerleaders, said she believes that most students are “taking (the scandal) in stride.”

“It’s more of an adult thing,” she said. “These kids are willing to bring the spirit back into the school, and it starts with them. If they don’t have it, nobody else will.”

Janet Kolb, an English teacher who complained about the grade changes to the state association that credentials educators, said she plans to discuss the meaning of integrity in her classes today.

“I think everyone knows what occurred here, and I am going to focus my first lesson on self-pride,” she said. “Pride really comes from within. We need to recognize an unfortunate, debilitating situation when it occurs and not let it wreck our own self-worth.”

“The students have the right to ask questions as far as re-establishing faith in our school,” she said. “We learn from pain and mistakes, and we are responsible for our own actions or inactions. Ultimately, in order to maintain self-worth, we must act with integrity.”

Added English teacher Estelle Waslosky: “We should be able to take something that went wrong, fix it and become better from the experience. That’s what makes a Blue Ribbon school.”