ORANGE COVE – A now-graduated high school senior from Orange Cove has said that he was denied the opportunity to attend the Orange Cove High School graduation due to what he and his family believe was an unwarranted suspension.
Orange Cove resident Gerardo Torres, 17, was not allowed to attend the Orange Cove High School graduation ceremony May 29 as a spectator while he served out a five-day suspension. Torres was suspended the week prior after he was accused of being under the influence of drugs while at school.
However, Torres insists that he was not under the influence — and has a hospital-administered drug test to prove it.
Events leading to suspension
Torres said that on Friday, May 22 — the last day of school for seniors — he went into the restroom at passing period to fix up his hair.
It was around 11 a.m., between third and fourth periods, where another group of students was also in the restroom. The restroom started to smell like marijuana, and at that time, a staff member walked in, Torres said.
That staff member told everyone to stay in the restroom while he called for the school learning director. The students were then taken to the office and searched one by one.
Torres said OCHS staff didn’t find anything on the students they searched, so they were sent back to class.
“Then they had found it suspicious that it smelled but they didn’t find nothing, so they picked us back up from class and they took us back to the office to check our vitals and our eyes,” Torres said.
By checking their vitals and eyes, Torres meant that the school nurse took his blood pressure and had him follow her finger with his eyes. Although his blood pressure was good, Torres said, it was his eyesight, or the way his eyes moved, that school staff had a problem with.
Once the school nurse had checked the students — at around 11:40 a.m. — Torres said the School Resource Officer was asked to come in. He didn’t arrive until close to 2:40 p.m., Torres said.
The SRO also checked the students’ eyes and determined that four of the five students, including Torres, were under the influence of marijuana.
“The officer told me that I was worse than the rest of the students, and, well, they suspended me,” Torres said.
Suspension aftermath
All of this took hours, Torres said, and it was nearly the end of the school day when he was told he would be suspended for five days and that his chances of walking at the graduation were less likely because of that.
It was then that Torres’s mother, Lucrecia Cruz, was first alerted to her son’s suspension with a phone call made at 2:45 p.m. — more than three hours after he was first suspected of being under the influence of drugs.
One of Torres’s older sisters then picked him up from school.
“My sister asked me, she was like, ‘Did you or did you not smoke?’ And I told her, I was like, ‘No,’” Torres said.
Torres said he then asked his sister if the dollar store sold drug tests, and they went to go get one. He took it, and it came back negative.
At that point, Torres’s sister called his mom, who called the school and told them they’d be willing to have Torres take another drug test in front of administrators to prove that he had tested negative. She was told they couldn’t do that, Torres said.
Cruz then took Torres to the Adventist Health Reedley hospital to get a drug test at the emergency room.
Information in Torres’s patient portal shows that he provided a sample for a urine analysis drug test just before 5 p.m. on May 22. The results of the test, which weren’t made available until later in the night, show Torres testing negative for all substances.
District policies
The Mid Valley Times sent a detailed list of questions to Kings Canyon Unified School District asking to confirm the events of Torres’s suspension. In a statement provided by KCUSD, the district said it cannot comment on specific student incidents as students have a right to privacy protected under both state and federal law.
KCUSD was, however, able to answer questions related to district policies.
In its statement, KCUSD said public school districts in California are bound by the California Education Code, which lays out grounds for suspension, and cannot suspend students in the absence of substantial evidence that the student has violated discipline policies.
KCUSD follows suspension procedures outlined in the Orange Cove High School Parent/Student Handbook, California Education Code section 48900 and the following sections and KCUSD Board of Trustees Policy and Administration Regulation 5144.1.
Consistent with these policies, the statement said that if the district becomes aware of a student behavior incident, school site administrators investigate the allegations in order to determine if there has been a violation of district policy or the state education code.
The statement also said KCUSD is “committed to balancing students’ right to a public education with its obligation to provide safe and drug free schools.”
“Regarding instances where students may be under the influence of alcohol, drugs or other substances, the district employs medical staff and law enforcement personnel who are trained to recognize signs and symptoms of individuals who are under the influence of illicit substances,” KCUSD said.
KCUSD said that if a site principal determines a suspension is warranted, administrators will notify the student through a conversation and give the student an opportunity to defend themself.
“Following that conversation, if the principal or designee chooses to move forward with the suspension, the parent/guardian is provided with written notice of the suspension,” KCUSD said in a statement.
Students who are suspended are not allowed to participate in district activities during the duration of their suspension, KCUSD said.
According to the OCHS Student/Parent Handbook, students who have been suspended will also be placed on a “loss of privileges” list for a period of 10 days, beginning at the end of the suspension period. Privileges include dances, senior activities and field trips.
Further, graduating seniors who are suspended at any time during the school year are not allowed to participate in the graduation ceremony, according to the handbook.
The district said suspensions can be challenged through a process outlined in section 49070 of the California Education Code.
Attempting to appeal
By the time Torres had taken the drug test and got the results, the school office was closed for the day and weekend. Given that the following Monday was a holiday, Torres’s family wasn’t able to contact anyone at the school or district until Tuesday, May 26.
On Tuesday, Cruz brought the test results to OCHS and showed them to the learning director. He told Cruz that he couldn’t go by those results and could only go by what the school nurse and SRO had determined.
One of Torres’s other older sisters, Yadira Cruz, had been talking to Lucrecia Cruz about this. When her mom filled her in, she questioned why the learning director couldn’t accept the results of the drug test.
Yadria Cruz then called the school herself, but no one would speak with her because she’s not Torres’s parent or legal guardian.
Lucrecia Cruz then went back to OCHS and asked to speak with the principal. She was told she couldn’t speak to the principal and to give the school 36 hours for an appeal to the suspension.
By Friday, May 29, the day of the graduation ceremony, the family had not heard anything about an appeal. They had learned, however, that Torres would not be allowed to attend the ceremony even as a spectator.
Torres was behind on five credits and was already not going to walk in the ceremony, which his family knew. However, he was still hoping to support his relative, who was also graduating, and his girlfriend, other friends and classmates.
Yadira Cruz said that when she learned this, “that’s when I got upset and I got mad,” and she went to OCHS to ask to speak to the learning director or principal.
After some back-and-forth regarding who the Cruzes could speak to at the school — and whether school officials would speak to Yadira or only Lucrecia — the two ended up at the KCUSD district office in Reedley.
From there, they were first sent to the Student Support Center, where an administrator told Lucrecia Cruz that Torres was suspended and there was nothing else they could do. The administrator couldn’t answer why Torres was suspended, so the Cruzes went back to the main district office and demanded to speak to the deputy superintendent.
Lucrecia Cruz was able to speak with the deputy superintendent, who told her that he would talk to a doctor and speak with the officer and nurse to understand what they based their results on when determining that Torres was under the influence.
This was around 2:30 p.m. on May 29. The deputy superintendent called Lucrecia Cruz at 5:30 p.m. In Spanish and interpreted by Yadira Cruz, Lucrecia Cruz said the deputy superintendent told her that the drug test Torres took was not valid based on the results she showed to him.
“He also mentioned that he called the school and that the nurse and officer stated that he was in fact under the influence, he was drugged, and there were witnesses … and that he was suspended still and because of that, he could not attend the ceremony,” Lucrecia Cruz said.
Testing for marijuana
Torres insists that he did not consume any marijuana and was not under the influence of drugs.
The Mid Valley Times reached out to the Orange Cove Police Department for more information about how police officers determine if a person is under the influence of marijuana. OCPD was not available by press time.
The urine analysis Torres received from Adventist Health Reedley showed that he did not have a detectable amount of marijuana in his system.
A urine analysis drug test doesn’t identify the psychoactive component of marijuana, which is tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, but rather screens for THC metabolites. Torres’s test did not detect any THC metabolites in his system above a cut-off level of 50 nanograms per milliliter.
Research in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology and other medical journals shows that THC metabolites can remain in a person’s system for days to weeks after their last use of marijuana.
Family frustrations
Following his suspension, OCHS administrators were willing to work with Torres to help him still finish his credits and get his diploma. They allowed him to be at the school, escorted by staff, the week leading up to the graduation ceremony to complete his work.
Torres’s sister said she would not be so upset about him missing the ceremony if she thought her brother was actually at fault. In fact, Torres was behind on a few credits and his family knew he had work he had to finish in order to graduate and receive his diploma.
“If he didn’t pass a class, if he wasn’t gonna graduate, we were not trying to get him to walk,” Yadira Cruz said. “If he didn’t finish his work, those are consequences he needs to face. … We are not going to sugar coat anything. If he’s at fault, he’s at fault, period.”
Yadira Cruz said that if her brother did something wrong, he would pay for it.
“But this is why I’m so upset, because he wasn’t,” she said. “When I saw the results, I said, ‘Yeah, OK, he didn’t, so why are they doing this?’”
Beyond Torres not being able to attend the graduation ceremony, the entire interaction with the school and district left his family feeling frustrated and confused.
When Torres was suspended, his family was not immediately provided with a written notice detailing why he was suspended. Yadira Cruz said she later learned that this is because someone other than Torres’s parent or legal guardian had picked him up from school that day. When that is the case, the school mails the suspension notice.
Yet, the family did not know or understand this while they were trying to appeal the suspension or find out more about it. They did eventually receive the notice in the mail on June 2.
Yadira Cruz also said she was repeatedly not allowed to speak to school or district administrators alongside Lucrecia Cruz, despite Lucrecia Cruz’s preference to have her daughter with her. Although many OCHS and KCUSD staff are fluent Spanish speakers, Yadira Cruz said her mom only speaks the Castilian dialect and often turns to Yadira and her other siblings for help communicating in educational and medical settings.
KCUSD said the district must be mindful about sharing information regarding students with non-educational rights holders, meaning anyone who is not the parent or legal guardian.
“There can be a number of situations where it would not be appropriate to have conversations about student matters with individuals who are not the student or the student’s parent/guardian,” KCUSD said in a statement. “Translation services are made available to parents who disclose that there is a need for language support.”
At the end of the day, Torres won’t be able to go back and join his classmates as they walk through the campuses of their elementary schools one final time. His memory of graduation will be the sound of fireworks in the distance, not his friends and family celebrating their accomplishments.
Yadira Cruz said the main thing she wants is for the school and district to apologize to her brother, not just for his missing the ceremony, but for leaving his fellow classmates with “an impression that he was drugging himself the last day of school.”
“I’m really upset at what they did,” Yadira Cruz said. “I don’t care about me; I have all my memories that I need, but he didn’t, and he’s my younger brother. So I’m gonna do what I have to do to get this out there, and I want an apology from all of them to him. (It’s) not gonna bring anything back, but that’s the least they can do.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The story has been updated on June 16, 2026 at 1:51 p.m. pst to clarify that Torres was already not going to walk at his graduation ceremony due to a shortage of credits and was solely denied entry as a spectator.
