RANCHO BERNARDO – At least two more Rancho Bernardo High School students implicated in a cheating scandal last spring have been expelled following disciplinary hearings, according to district documents and officials.
They were brought up before separate administrative hearing panels on charges stemming from a discovery in April that students had hacked into the school computer system.
The agenda for Monday's meeting of the Poway Unified School District board contains short descriptions of nearly a dozen disciplinary matters at district high schools, with no names, schools or dates specified.
School officials are limited by privacy concerns about what they can disclose, but Superintendent Donald Phillips confirmed that expulsions from Rancho Bernardo High are among those on the list.
Board members will get a more detailed briefing in closed session. Public records indicate the expulsions carry into the first semester of the 2008-09 school year, which begins Tuesday.
Two previous expulsions were reported at the board's June meeting. Phillips said not all the cases have been settled, and “there's an appeal going on” with one of them.
District officials previously have said as many as seven students acquired advance copies of classroom tests or altered grades reported on transcripts, using hacking software and stolen passwords to gain access to the computer files.
The hacking came to light when a flash drive used to download teachers' files was found in a school computer.
Jeff Ristine: (760) 737-7578; jeff.ristine@uniontrib.com
