Editorial:

Dear Newport-Mesa Unified School District officials, please don’t evict Ron Martin.

We call on the school board in particular, whose seven trustees are scheduled to reconvene Tuesday night, to instruct Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard to reinstate Martin in his job as drama instructor at Corona del Mar High School.

We call on our readers, too, to show up at the board meeting to voice their support for Martin.

The district refuses to disclose its reasons for putting him on leave. But because we don’t know why district officials sidelined Martin, we can only take Martin’s word for it that his punishment may have had something to do with tensions that have lingered on-campus since he directed the school’s controversial production of the gay-sympathetic musical, “Rent,” his feud with CdM’s former principal, Fal Asrani, who tried to derail the show and has since exited the district, and his support of a newly formed on-campus Gay-Straight Alliance.

If he was punished for no other reason than allegedly being overheard claiming that he had gotten a “certain person fired,” as Martin claimed on his Facebook page, then that’s a poor reason for sidelining a popular instructor.

Such a move only gives the school and district’s critics more fodder for accusing the district administration under Hubbard of being reactionary and encouraging a homophobic and unsafe atmosphere at Corona del Mar High.

Sadly, the brouhaha over “Rent” forever will be intertwined in Corona del Mar High lore with a vicious sideshow in which one of the high school musical’s performers, Hail Ketchum, was targeted in a Facebook video posted by a group of male students who threatened her with rape and murder.

None of those boys was expelled, although the district is supposed to enforce a zero-tolerance policy against students who make such threats.

That was the topic of last week’s editorial.

While we commend the district for finally issuing a written apology to Ketchum this month, the Daily Pilot won’t stop from keeping the pressure on district officials to ensure that no student is ever allowed to commit such a heinous act without being booted out.

So we are calling on the school board to hold Hubbard accountable by getting him to ensure — without any more glaring exceptions to the zero-tolerance policy — that he will keep the children who go to Newport-Mesa schools safe.

In November 2010, the seats now occupied by four of the board’s members — Karen Yelsey, Michael Collier, Judy Franco and Walt Davenport — will be up for election.

Until then, your constituents will be watching you to see how aggressively you hold Hubbard to that policy.

And finally, for the record, the mother of one of the boys has contacted us in recent days to complain that we never gave them and their parents a chance to tell their side of this story.

It had proved difficult for our reporters to obtain the boys’ names because the district had refused to release their names.

We have since pursued this mother’s invitation to interview her, but instead she has referred our reporter to her attorney, who has not been returning the reporter’s phone calls.

We also can now report that we have obtained the boys’ names through a court-certified transcript of what was said and who said what in the infamous video.

One of the lines delivered by the son of the woman who called us does not paint a pretty picture; he talks about taking “a sniper to her [Ketchum’s] forehead.”

Judging from this one snippet from the boys’ litany of profane and hateful invective, it’s hard to grasp how there could be another side to this story.

But, again, we welcome the opportunity to interview the boys and their parents so they can finally tell their side of the story.