Middle school teacher jailed in theft, drug case

The message "Stay in school. Don't do drugs" lost some credibility for Lewis Turner on Wednesday. That is when he discovered police had arrested his daughter's sixth-grade math teacher at school the previous day with cocaine and a snorting straw in her purse.

"If you can't trust teachers, you can't trust nobody," said Turner as he sat in his minivan Wednesday waiting for the bell to ring, a pair of stickers that said "Proud parent of a D.A.R.E. graduate" slapped to his rear bumper. The nationwide D.A.R.E. program teaches students how to avoid drugs, which is important to Turner, who struggled with drug addiction but doesn't even drink anymore. "It makes me worry and wonder if she solicited kids."

Drugs weren't the reason Clark County School District police came for teacher Jessica Gendall on Tuesday at Mack Middle School, near Sahara Avenue and Lamb Boulevard.

The officer was surprised to find 0.3 grams of cocaine in a bag within an Altoid container, discovered while routinely searching her during the arrest, police spokesman Ken Young said. In comparison, a standard packet of sugar is 4 grams. There is no indication Gendall was selling drugs to students, Young said.

Police were there to confront Gendall about suspicions that she was selling the school's TI-84 graphing calculators on eBay. The investigation began with an Oct. 11 phone call from a man in Oceanside, Calif. He said he had bought a calculator from Gendall on eBay but said "Jerome Mack M.S." was stamped on it.

Officers looked into Gendall's eBay history, initially finding she had sold 15 calculators, all TI-84s, authorities said.

On Tuesday, an officer went to the school to talk with the 21-year-old Gendall, just hired by the district this August.

She admitted to taking calculators from a box in her class and agreed to show them her eBay account, authorities said. It indicated that she had sold 47 calculators for a total of $2,792, according to the officer's report.

These calculators are valued at $130 a piece, equating to a $6,110 loss for the school.

In her statement, Gendall said she sold the calculators because she was in financial trouble. The starting salary for first-year teachers in Clark County is about $35,000. As she was being arrested on allegations of felony theft, the officer discovered the cocaine and paraphernalia, adding those two possession charges to the list, authorities said.

Gendall was arrested at school and replaced by a substitute, but students and parents said the district didn't tell them a thing.

"The district should tell parents," said Beatriz Zazare, the mother of a sixth- grade boy. She learned of the incident from her son after school on Wednesday.

Despite no official word from the district, the school was abuzz with rumors. "The entire school knows it," said Turner's 11-year-old daughter, Tionne.

Students were talking but didn't know what to believe, said Matt Garcia, who was in Gendall's class. He didn't believe she was arrested for cocaine, as friends had claimed.

After being told it wasn't just a rumor, he stuttered to speak.

"She didn't look like the kind of person who would do this," he said. "She's so nice."

Parent Eddie Ghosn had no clue about the arrest but waited anxiously outside school Wednesday to see whether she taught his son. "She didn't teach him. Thank God," Ghosn said while driving past after picking up his son. Now, he will talk with his son in considering whether to change schools, he said.

But Gendall probably won't return.

Theft of school property is grounds for dismissal. If she is convicted of drug charges, that also would be enough to warrant her immediate dismissal, without warning. But the district is legally prohibited from revealing specifics about personnel.

Young said police previously have arrested teachers with drugs but "in isolated cases." It's by no means common, he said.

The most recent case he can recall is when Dondero Elementary School Principal LeRoy Espinosa and Joseph Rodriquez, an office manager at Simmons Elementary School, were arrested in September 2010 on charges of felony possession of methamphetamine. They shared a home.

School police were called to Simmons Elementary School after a bag of methamphetamine was found in the office. Rodriquez admitted the drugs were his and said he lived with Espinosa.