Parents Sign Agreement on Return of Son to School

NEWHALL —  A Valencia doctor and his wife, charged with four counts of failing to send their 14-year-old son to school for a year, have agreed there will be no more playing hooky for them.

Brenda and John Cocco signed an agreement Wednesday with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and the William S. Hart Union High School District that their son, Justin, would be attending a school regularly within 30 days, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ann Marie Wise said Thursday.

Many of the terms of the agreement were not made public because of student privacy laws, Wise said. But she said Justin must be attending school regularly by the end of the 30-day period or the district attorney will go through with a pretrial conference still scheduled for June.

“If they don’t comply, then we will have them back in court very shortly,” Wise said. “If they do what they are supposed to do, then the case will be closed.”

In March, the Coccos were arrested after Hart district officials reported to the district attorney’s office that Justin had missed school for over a year.

In documents filed with the court, school district officials alleged that Justin’s parents were negligent about getting their son to school.

Before the agreement was reached, the district attorney’s office filed another charge against the Coccos, accusing them of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. That charge would also be dismissed under the agreement, along with the other four counts against the Coccos.

The Coccos’ lawyer, Milton Simon, said Thursday that a criminal court was not the appropriate place to settle the educational problems of a 14-year-old boy.

“I think there should have been a more private forum for this,” Simon said. “All the Coccos ever wanted was what was best for their son.”

Simon also said Justin, who was enrolled in a program for emotionally disturbed students at Sierra Vista Junior High School two years ago, will attend another school outside Santa Clarita, but declined to name the school.

Justin suffers from Tourette syndrome, a neurological disorder, and attention-deficit disorder as well as other learning disabilities, according to court records and his mother.

Brenda Cocco, 56, told The Times last week that she kept her son out of the school because officials had placed him in a program that she believed stigmatized him and failed to properly address his learning problems.

Both Brenda and John Cocco, an internist at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital, declined to comment.