Educators Ponder New Cheating Policy

They set out to accomplish a simple task: create a policy to discipline students for cheating.

An academic honesty policy would fit with Ventura Supt. Joseph Spirito’s push to promote core values and provide a consistent set of rules for all district teachers, avoiding the sort of problems that arose last year when accusations of cheating at Ventura High School led to a lawsuit.

But the road to creating a cheating policy for high school students has been a long one, undermined at first with murky legal issues and then, more importantly, with philosophical questions about how tough a policy and what the punishments should be.

“We thought we could do it in less than, talk about idealistic, three or four months,” said John Weiss, president of the Ventura Unified Education Assn., the teachers union that drafted the policy. “Boy, was I wrong on that one.”

More than 1 1/2 years after educators first broached the idea, the union has developed a policy they’re satisfied with and will present it to trustees for approval Tuesday night.

Among the provisions, a high school student caught cheating four times can be transferred to an alternative school, such as Pacific High, where students with discipline problems are frequently sent. Earlier offenses can mean failing grades on assignments or suspensions.

But educators acknowledge the policy is a compromise, borne of their own uncertainty about the best way to deal with academic dishonesty.

“We’re dealing with teenagers and young people and must teach good values,” said Jaime Castellanos, principal at Buena High School. “When a kid has made a mistake, there’s punishment. . . . But if a kid gets a scarlet letter, then something is wrong.” What is certain is that cheating is going on in schools today.

Many students say the problem is very common. Some can rattle off an incident they witnessed that week: students bringing in cheat sheets, peeking over at a neighbor’s paper, whispering answers across the room, signing answers with hands or plagiarizing from encyclopedias.

But sometimes they say teachers shy away from snagging a student for cheating.

That certainly wasn’t the case last year when a Ventura High School teacher accused a student of stealing a rubber stamp she used to validate homework.

English teacher Sue McEwen, expelled the student from her class and gave him a failing grade. When his parents successfully appealed the decision and had his punishment reduced, McEwen filed a lawsuit against the student.

The incident touched a nerve among critics who accused the teacher of carrying a small incident too far and among educators who said the district should do more to hold the students accountable.

Trustees received numerous calls from teachers at Ventura High School who wanted guidance on how to handle cheating. Though Buena High had long had a written policy, Ventura High’s teachers were allowed to take care of cheating incidents individually.

That incident, along with Spirito’s push for core values, fueled the quest for a uniform academic honesty policy.

The first draft was written by the district’s lawyer, but teachers said it was so full of legal jargon that no one could understand it.

So administrators asked the teachers union to create a policy in layman’s terms.

The union formed a committee, bringing in one or two representatives from various schools. Creating a policy proved to be a difficult matter, when there were so many issues that needed to be considered.

In early October, the union’s panel brought the board of trustees a working draft, complete with a call for expulsion from a course after three cheating offenses. But the panel members left the meeting flustered and a few trustees appeared frustrated after the superintendent asked them to rework the policy, citing possible legal problems.

So they came up with a new policy, calling for sending a student to an alternative school after the fourth infraction.