A former Belen Middle School teacher accused of allowing a student to hide a marijuana pipe in his pickup truck during school hours two years ago entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors Wednesday.
Tony Salas, 58, of Bernardo, pleaded no contest to one count of attempted contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He was originally indicted on one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a fourth-degree felony, and a misdemeanor charge of tampering with evidence.
District Judge John Pope, who accepted the plea agreement, sentenced Salas to 364 days of unsupervised probation and gave him a conditional discharge -- meaning that if he successfully completes his probation without incident, his record will no longer show a conviction.
Salas made no comments during the hearing.
Salas' plea agreement comes nearly four months after a jury was unable to reach a verdict in the case, causing a mistrial. The jury heard testimony from several people, including the student who said his former social studies teacher helped him hide a marijuana pipe before police brought in a drug-sniffing dog to Belen Middle School sometime in January 2005.
A well-intentioned teacher protects a student from getting a criminal record that could ruin his life and keep him out of college and this is the thanks he gets? He should have gotten Teacher of The Year! Refusing to support a corrupt war takes a lot of courage and I for one think Mr. Salas is an extremely brave individual for doing what he did for his student. I only wish that all teachers had his courage.
I want to make it perfectly clear that I do not approve of teenagers smoking weed, especially when they should be in school. If one of my kids was stupid enough to let me catch them smoking weed, I would do a fine job of kicking their disobedient little butts myself. I don't need the state to parent my kids for me and saddle them with a criminal record that could ruin their career prospects later in life. This is weed we are talking about, the safest recreational and psychoactive substance that exists. When a kid experiments with tobacco or alcohol, nobody suggests a criminal record or jail time is warranted. But as soon as you mention MARIJUANA everybody over-reacts. It's a ridiculous double standard. Anyway, the real crime that Mr. Salas committed was caring enough about his student to be honest with his mother.
The young man's mother testified that Salas had told her about the incident during a parent-teacher conference several weeks later. She said she had been concerned about her son's mood changes and falling grades and told the former teacher that she was worried that the boy might have been smoking marijuana.
She said that Salas told her that he was concerned that her son was using marijuana and that there had been a prior incident when he had taken him out of class and asked if he had anything on him. The mother said Salas told her about the incident when he allowed her son to hide the pipe in the truck.
""I hate this is happening because he's ( Salas ) is a good man," the boy's mother had told the jury. "But just because he's a good man doesn't mean that he didn't do anything wrong.
"I wish the best for Mr. Salas, but this happened. I think you're an awesome person, Mr. Salas, but you know we had that conversation."
Mr. Salas should have told the kid to dispose of the pipe in a garbage can. A ten dollar pipe can be replaced but your reputation can not. I hope that busybody mother is proud of herself. She has managed to waste a lot of tax dollars to incriminate a caring teacher. Good job, you insensitive moron. If I knew where she lived I would put a bag of flaming poo on her doorstep. OK, no I wouldn't but I'm still not impressed.
