Ventura County Board Backs Expulsion for Knife

The parents of a Thousand Oaks middle school student lost their bid Friday to purge their son’s academic record of an expulsion he received last fall for inadvertently bringing a knife to school.

Jorge and Rose Bautista asked the Ventura County Board of Education to expunge the black mark, arguing that their son Daniel’s punishment was too severe. Daniel, 13, said he slipped the knife into the pocket of his pants one morning while cleaning his room and only discovered it was there after arriving at school.

The county board voted 2 to 1 to reject the Bautistas’ appeal, letting stand a punishment that officials in the Thousand Oaks district described as among the most lenient they had seen for a weapons offense.

The board of trustees of the Conejo Valley Unified School District voted in October to expel Daniel. But they allowed him to attend another middle school after serving a five-day suspension. They also let him return to Sycamore Canyon School after Thanksgiving break.

The Bautistas said the eighth-grader should not have been removed from his school and that they feared the expulsion would taint his academic career.

“My concern was that it would label him, and that would be totally unfair. He is a good kid who made a mistake,” said Rose Bautista, who with her husband took the unusual step of requesting a public hearing on the matter.

The Bautistas also pointed out that another Sycamore Canyon School student who brought a knife to school last year was only suspended. Richard Simpson, assistant superintendent of instruction for the Conejo district, said the two cases weren’t similar. The other student brought in a tool that included a small blade that didn’t fit the definition of a knife in the education code or the penal code. Daniel’s knife was considered a weapon because it had a locking blade, Simpson said.

Simpson also said after Friday’s hearing that Daniel’s expulsion would stay on his record only through junior high, and would not appear on his high school transcripts or be revealed to prospective colleges or employers.

“School safety is of paramount importance, and kids need to understand that bringing weapons of any fashion onto a school campus puts people at risk,” Simpson said.

Daniel had only had the knife a few days, a gift from his father who had found it on a fishing trip. His parents warned him not to take it to school.

The youngster said he tried to hide the knife after discovering it in his pocket early in the school day. The plan backfired during gym class when it slipped through his shorts and landed in front of a teacher.

At Friday’s hearing, an educational and civil rights advocate representing the Bautistas argued that the Conejo district failed to prove, as required by education code, that Daniel was a continuing danger to the school or that it had tried other means of correction. Mark Lopez, director of Encinitas-based SchoolWatch, also accused the district of ordering the expulsion as part of an inflexible zero-tolerance policy, instead of considering the merits of Daniel’s case.

“This was an accidental case of bringing a knife on campus,” Lopez said. “Zero tolerance makes zero sense.”

School district officials said they do not have a zero-tolerance policy but weigh every case individually. They said their lenient treatment of Daniel, a model student, was evidence of that.