Effort to alter Corona del Mar High grades detailed
The tutor, the students recalled, had a plan to help them improve their grades.
It wouldn’t require additional studying.
But how?
He couldn’t say on the phone, according to official accounts that the students submitted to the Newport-Mesa Unified School District after the fact.
It was late on a school night in April 2013 when the tutor, an adult, and some of his teenage clients allegedly met at a Newport Coast home to hatch the plan.
The students had been sworn to secrecy. Their tutor even gave them a code name.
“He told me I was part of the Bakers,” one student wrote. “The Bakers planned to key log the school computer system to get tests and change grades.”
At least five participants piled into two cars and drove past the sleeping mansions, according to the written accounts and interviews with sources who had knowledge of the events but requested anonymity. The drive, to Corona del Mar High School, was one the teens made daily, but certainly not this close to midnight.
They turned onto Eastbluff Drive — the palm tree-lined thoroughfare that leads into nationally ranked CdM — and pulled into the desolate parking lot.
At least three of the students contended in their statements that the tutor, Timothy Lance Lai, then gave the following instructions: One boy, a junior, would wait in the car near the bus turnaround while the rest of the group walked onto campus.
The group, made up of at least three students, headed toward the 300 building. Lai, the students alleged in their statements, unsuccessfully tried to pick a building lock.
“Lai spent some time trying to open the back door while we all watched for people,” one student wrote in his statement to the district.
Undeterred, the 29-year-old tutor searched until he found an unlocked side door, according to allegations in two of the student statements.
He walked through the halls, the students wrote, finally reaching the desired target: a chemistry classroom.
Once inside, students allege, the tutor took photos of an upcoming chemistry exam and placed a key-stroke logger onto the back of a teacher’s computer. The device would eventually be used to record passwords necessary to access the school’s grading database, according to student accounts.
It would be an hour before Lai emerged from the darkened school, according to the student accounts.
With the recorded information, the Bakers would possess the ability to subtly boost grades.
The plan worked, according to criminal charges later filed against Lai, giving students advanced access to tests. Grades were eventually fixed for an undetermined number of high schoolers, possibly without the knowledge of some of them.
Lai’s attorney, Donald Rubright, said last week that he is working on discovery and declined to comment on the case or the students’ written accounts.
Earlier this month, Rubright said, “I think everyone, including my client, would like this to be over with.”
Over the past few months the Daily Pilot has reviewed 20 confidential student accounts of what happened relating to the cheating scandal. The accounts, which are part of official school records, provide consistent descriptions of events, but neither the Orange County district attorney’s office nor the Newport Beach Police Department would corroborate or comment on the accuracy of the students’ statements.
The Pilot agreed not to name the students or the sources who provided access to their statements and authenticated them. However, other sources, both on and off the record, and in affidavits and publicly available school records, were used to verify information contained in the student accounts.
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After that first night
Several months passed after the alleged April break-in. Lai became a person of interest to police investigating the case but he couldn’t be readily located. On Dec. 18, 2013, police said, they searched Lai’s car and his duplex in Irvine but reported that the tutor was gone.
He was arrested about 10 months later, in October, by Newport Beach police detectives as he returned to Los Angeles International Airport on a flight from South Korea.
Lai was charged with and pleaded not guilty to one count of second-degree burglary and four counts of computer fraud, all felonies. He faces up to five years and eight months in jail if convicted, according to the district attorney’s office.
Lai, who posted bail after his arrest, could not be located by the Pilot for an interview.
No students were charged in the case.
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Of ‘Bakers,’ ‘cupcakes’ and ‘the Captain’
Most of the kids were sophomores when the cheating began, according to the records. At least two were juniors.
Lai, according to the signed accounts, provided some of the Bakers with keyloggers — devices they nicknamed “cupcakes” — and assigned each of the teens a teacher.
Eventually, the high schoolers wrote, they would return the “cupcakes” to their “captain,” allegedly Lai, and he would access the information.
The group held various meetings to discuss the plan. Unlike Lai’s tutoring sessions, which would cost upward of $40 per hour, the meetings were free to attend, according to students involved, and Lai was not given extra compensation.
Over the spring semester, Lai, according to allegations in the student statements, would teach a few students how to keylog their teachers’ computers and quickly take photos of tests while their instructors were out of the room.
The district first learned about possible cheating during the last week of school in June 2013, when a science teacher notified CdM administrators that someone had accessed her computer and changed students’ grades, according to an affidavit filed with the Orange County Superior Court.
Two girls were identified as having their grades boosted by a remote computer four days earlier, according to the court papers.
One of the two students told Vladimir Anderson, the school’s resource officer, that her friend installed a keylogger — given to her by a tutor — on the back of a teacher’s computer to access the school’s grading database, the affidavit states.
When Anderson attempted to obtain the tutor’s name from the female student, the girl’s mother informed him that they had retained an attorney and declined to make a statement, the papers say.
The girls were suspended from CdM. Eventually, the administration was notified that a tutor named “Tim” could be responsible for the cheating, but few other details were readily available at the time.
Some members of the Bakers were shaken by the girl’s near-miss and wouldn’t return to the tutor the next school year. Many wrote that they felt manipulated.
“I felt uncomfortable after hearing his plan to go to the school, but I felt obligated to put myself through that because I felt that I was in a situation where once you know, you have to stay,” a boy, a junior, said in his statement.
Lai had integrated himself into the students’ lives, attending birthday parties and other social gatherings, one involved parent told the Pilot.
“He had more influence than I’d like to admit,” said the parent, to whom the Daily Pilot granted anonymity to protect the identity of the parent’s child.
A few students worried that Lai would stop tutoring or somehow punish them for leaving the Bakers. The tutor had boasted about his ability to manipulate people because he was a psychology major, one teen wrote in his account of events.
This kept students silent as well.
“I feared the reaction of other kids at CdM for being the one to turn friends in,” one boy wrote. “Also, in a way, I was scared of Mr. Lai and how he might retaliate against me.”
During one-on-one tutoring sessions, Lai would sometimes talk about his family and personal life, the youths recalled. He told the teens to invest in silver to prepare for a recession.
“In the past he had talked about other off-the-wall ideas that seemed more imaginary than real,” one student explained in his statement
By all accounts, the students described Lai as a highly recommended tutor. He would use PowerPoint presentations to help students in calculus, world history and other advanced classes.
“He was a pretty strange guy, but very helpful,” a student wrote.
However, there was a fear of provoking Lai. Some involved believed Lai would change their grades without asking permission if he felt he had been disrespected, one student wrote.
“I can remember one time receiving a small grade round from a B-plus to an A-minus in math because I questioned his capabilities,” the student wrote.
The small grade boosts also made the cheating harder to spot, according to an email sent from Paul Reed, the district’s chief financial officer, to Supt. Fred Navarro, that the Pilot reviewed through the state’s open-records law.
“Hackers also changed grades for others, sometimes for people who weren’t friends, to cover their tracks,” Reed wrote in the email.
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Cheating is discovered
On Dec. 17, 2013, a CdM teacher approached Assistant Principal Tim Tolzda to report that one of his colleagues had told him that a student was keylogging a school computer.
Tolzda called the student, a male junior, into his office, and the boy admitted placing the device on his math teacher’s computer and pulled it out of his backpack, according to the records.
A source with knowledge of the proceedings told the Pilot that the boy and others involved were told they wouldn’t be punished for their actions if they discussed the case with administrators, that the focus of the case was on Lai.
Learning that, the boy, the source said, then helped identify 11 students who may have had some degree of knowledge about the events.
One by one, students were pulled from class and brought into the office for questioning. Some implicated their friends and classmates; others denied participating but said they were aware of the Bakers.
Most were high-achieving honors students with high grade point averages. Some participated in prestigious academic programs; others were athletes. A few were close friends, while some just knew one another from having classes together.
The common denominator appeared to be Lai.
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Students are questioned, disciplined
The first student who had been brought in agreed to place a tape-recorded phone call to Lai at the police station while officers listened in.
“During that call, I asked all of the questions suggested by the detectives, and it resulted in Mr. Lai admitting to doing everything that I had said he did,” the student wrote in an amendment to the initial statement he provided the district.
Police and prosecutors would not discuss whether the recording would be used as evidence in the criminal case against Lai or whether they believed the conversation confirmed Lai’s involvement in the plot to boost grades.
According to records obtained by the Daily Pilot, 14 students were suspended for five days in connection with the alleged cheating.
However, in January 2014, the Newport-Mesa Unified School District board of trustees approved stipulated expulsion agreements for five of the students.
The agreements forced the students to another district high school for a semester and banned them from participating in after-school events or sports. Signing the agreements also meant that colleges wouldn’t be given information about students’ involvement in the episode unless the students disclosed the information themselves on their applications.
Six students had already left the district for other schools, the board said at the time.
Allegations of unequal treatment of some students also surfaced. Some students, a former administrator said, were given a pass for reasons unclear to her.
“Their names were pulled from the list because the district said they didn’t have enough evidence ... ,” said Jane Garland, the district’s former head of discipline, who resigned in the wake of the scandal because she did not agree with the punishments. “But it was basically the same evidence we had on many of the other 11.”
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‘Culture of Cheating’
Indeed, parents have questioned why only 11 students were ultimately punished, arguing the number of cheaters was probably higher and pointing to what many characterized as a “culture of cheating” at the elite high school.
Students estimated in their statements to officials that up to 50 students benefited in some way from the keylogging activities.
One parent, whose name is being withheld to protect the identity of his child, said he believes the problem was more far reaching.
“They don’t want to do their due diligence to find out the problem and correct it,” he said. “They want to say, ‘We’ve caught them, we’ve corrected it, and the school is as good as golden.’”
Garland has also raised questions about the way students were expelled.
She called the investigation “a total farce” in an email to district officials in January 2014, arguing that evidence against many of the children was thin.
“Other than the students who implicated themselves — the district has no evidence who key-logged, who broke into the school, who had only knowledge,” Garland wrote. “And yet all are receiving the same punishments.”
Parents say Lai’s tutoring business thrived because of the grade-obsessed culture at CdM, where 99% of graduates go on to attend college.
Garland said pressure from parents to receive high marks and the demand of keeping up with high-achieving classmates add to the issues at CdM.
“CdM itself demands that students get good grades to keep its elite reputation,” Garland said. “CdM is not run like a public school.”
Newport-Mesa Unified officials have expressed their desire to move past the incident and have repeatedly declined to comment since the school board made its decision and the case moved to court.
An internal grade audit was conducted last year, but no other students were ultimately punished, the district has said.
After Lai was arrested in October, CdM Principal Kathy Scott circulated an email to staff asking that the cheating incident not be a topic of discussion with students or parents.
“We do not need to revisit the past and we do not need to engage ourselves in serving as the judge and jury for this case,” she wrote. “Our top priority is maintaining a positive and safe learning environment for all students and any discussion with anyone, including the media, has the potential to become disruptive, divisive and counterproductive.”